Pricing is reasonably keen for Toshiba’s latest Q Series Pro SSD, which is available in 128-, 256- and (harder to get) 512GB sizes. Bearing this in mind, the Q Series Pro works out at less than 50p per gigabyte. Also see: What’s the best SSD This drive’s controller is labelled with a Toshiba part number, but it could yet be a rebranded Marvell chip. Bucking the trend of most SSDs this may even be a cacheless design, with no additional DRAM to buffer data before writing. It also tips the scales at a mobile-friendly 53g, thanks to its 7mm-thin aluminium case. Starting with the basic sequential drag race, the Q Series Pro returned figures of 553- and 519MB/s for its reads and writes. In the CrystalDiskMark test, we noted a lift in sequential reads with the Pro drive, but at 510MB/s reads and 470MB/s for writes, results are similar to last year’s SSD. Single-threaded random read/write numbers were a little different. The Pro scored around 22MB/s reads and 78MB/s writes; the previous model could hit 22- and 90MB/s, suggesting a little more speed in small-file writing. Stacked data showed again that Toshiba has elected to tune performance to read tasks, with 379MB/s 4kB random reads and 259MB/s random writes. In the AS SSD test, the overall score was fractionally ahead with the new Pro-branded Q Series. Delving into the results, we can see that the sum of multithreaded write operations is slightly higher, now hitting 49k IOPS against the latest version’s 58k IOPS. Read IOPS are unchanged at 91.9k IOPS. The Toshiba Q Series Pro performs close enough to the original Q Series SSD that it can be hard to separate them. We note that Toshiba has expanded its warranty terms, and will now guarantee its Q Series SSD for three years rather than just one.
