Toshiba RC500 500GB NVMe M.2 SSD review - Introduction

Toshiba OCZ RC500 NVMe PCIe SSD (1700 MB/s - 500GB - 50 USD)
Proper M.2.Class SSD performance for a proper price

We review probably the last Toshiba SSD ever, as a name change is inbound for the Toshiba branded SSD products (Toshiba is already part of Kioxia). None the less, meet the Toshiba RC500. A value proposition at NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 performance in that 2 GB/sec range. The prices? How does this sound: 500GB for 59 EUR / 49 USD. Yeah, these are BiCS 96-layer alright, not even QLC as it is TLC even. 

First an explanation on Kioxia - Kioxia is a Japanese word for “memory” and Greek word for “value”. Toshiba Memory Europe GmbH announced that it will officially change its name to Kioxia Europe GmbH on October 1, 2019. The name Kioxia (kee-ox-ee-uh) has been adopted for the names of all Toshiba Memory companies. 

The RC500 is available in two flavors: the 500GB version that I tested and a 250GB model that is just a tenner cheaper than the 500GB model, so you already know where my recommendation is going. Toshiba is claiming numbers that run into the 1700 MB/s; with Write Speeds up to 1600 MB/s for the 500GB M2 SSDs, at 10 cent per GB. Heck, they even offer 5 years warranty. The TBW (TeraBytes Written—the total amount of data that a company is willing to guarantee can be written to the drive) ratings of 100 and 200TB for the 250 and 500GB drives.

The SSD is a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe 1.3c) M.2 form factor SSD, it has been fitted with new Vertically stacked 96-layer NAND TLC. The performance numbers of a proper SATA3 SSD offers these days are simply excellent, but with the more niche NVMe SSDs you can easily quadruple performance, which offers serious numbers. The unit follows a smaller M.2 2280 form factor (8cm) so it will fit on most ATX motherboards capable of M.2 just fine. Anyway, wanna see how fast it really is? Next page and onwards into the review then.