Toshiba XG6-P NVMe SSDs Bring Fast Speeds And Big Capacities To Gaming And Workstation PCs
While some companies have begun trotting out PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid state drives, Toshiba on Wednesday announced an updated version of its XG6 series from last year. The new XG6-P still shuttles data through the PCIe 3.0 bus, but ups the ante over the previous generation drives with faster sequential and random read and write speeds. Toshiba also doubled the capacity of the new drive series.
The previous generation XG6 series made waves for being the first NVMe SSDs to incorporate 96-layer BiCS 3D NAND flash memory chips. Compared to its 64-layer predecessors, the then-new 96-layer tech allowed Toshiba to increase the capacity per unit chip size by 40 percent. As a result, that drive line topped out at 1TB.
Toshiba is taking things even further with its XG6-P line. It's still using 96-layer BiCS 3D NAND flash memory, but the capacity on the upper end has ballooned to 2TB for this round. As for performance, here's how it breaks down:
- Sequential Read: Up to 3,180MB/s
- Sequential Write: Up to 2,920MB/s
- Random Read: Up to 355,000 IOPS
- Random Write: Up to 365,000 IOPS
Toshiba is primarily targeting workstations and datacenters, though the company also says these drives would make fine additions to high-end gaming PCs. As it pertains to the former, Toshiba points out that its XG6-P series operate at less than 5 watts.
"With the industry’s broadest SSD portfolio, we at Toshiba Memory are committed to
addressing the full spectrum of applications," said Alvaro Toledo, vice president, SSD marketing
& product planning for Toshiba Memory America, Inc. "The XG6-P Series bridges the gap
between high-end client and entry-level data center requirements, including burgeoning
composable storage architectures that enable high-performance, scale-out designs for artificial
intelligence (AI) and machine learning, edge computing and HPC."
The new drives will be available in the single-sided M.2 2280 form factor and will begin sampling by the end of the month. Toshiba has not yet announced pricing.
