Toshiba today announced its new mainstream NVMe SSDs in the OCZ RC100 series. The drives feature Toshiba's latest 64-layer BiCS 3D TLC NAND flash memory and will be available in capacities of 120GB, 240GB and 480GB.
The OCZ RC100 series SSDs are marketed as cost-effective drives targeted at consumers. Toshiba has chosen a price level for the NVMe drives that is lower than most high-end NVME drives. With prices of $59.99, $79.99 and $154.00 for respectively the 120GB, 240GB and 480GB models, the price level is similar to that of SATA SSDs, but with much higher performance.
Toshiba specifies maximum sequential reads and writes of up to 1600 MB/s and 1100 MB/s respectively for the 480GB. Random reads and writes are specified at 150,000 IOPS and 110,000 IOPS respectively for the 480GB model.
The 240GB drive has similar performance numbers, the 120GB is slower with the specified maximum sequential reads of 1350 MB/s and maximum sequential reads of 700 MB/s. Also, random performance of the 120GB is considerable lower than of the 240GB and 480GB models with the specified 80,000 IOPS for random reads and 95,000 IOP for random writes. The speeds are somewhat limited because the RC100 series SSDs use 2 PCIe lanes, instead of the 4 lanes used by higher end drives.
The drives come in the small M2. 2242 form-factor and contain an unnamed controller. Toshiba also hasn't added any DRAM cache memory to the RC100 drives, instead they make use of the RAM memory of the host system.
The SSDs should be become available at retailers by the end of the week.
