Toshiba THNSN51T02DUK Benchmark

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Found this 1TB M.2 NVME SSD on Craigslist for $150 USD.  It looks like an OEM drive, although I am not 100% certain of it's origins.  It also looks like the actual drive name might be XG3.  It is uncertain at the time of writing.  For the price, I would say this thing is pretty sweet.  EBay has some models for sell for $300~$385, that were "pulled from working systems".

Benchmarks

Here is the AS SSD benchmark you came to see.

toshibaBench.png

Now let's compare it to a Samsung 960 Pro NVME SSD.

 

samsungBench.png

 So, obviously the Samsung 960 Pro destroys the Toshiba SSD but if we consider the price vs performance, the Toshiba looks a bit more appealing.  Now this comparison isn't perfect because mine was $150, however, Amazon sells the same model for $590.00, the Samsung 960 Pro 1 TB version on Amazon is $629.99.  These prices are at the time of writing of course.  I suspect the Toshiba OCZ RD400 may be the same drive as the "XG3" that I benchmarked but this is very much speculation on my part.  If you can pick one up from eBay for about $300 or so, then having 1TB of pretty fast NVME storage is really nice, for the price.  It's zippy enough that I personally haven't noticed a difference in boot times, load times of games, and general transfer speeds of various files.

My Use Case

For me, this drive was perfect because it offered a solid 1TB of storage space at a reasonable price.  I currently only use this drive to store my library of Steam Games.  Every game loads up blazing fast and I haven't had a single issue with it for the last 4 weeks.  The best part is, it appears to use a Microsoft Driver instead of a proprietary driver like Samsung.  Which means, it is much easier to use as a boot device and no special drivers are required to maximize the speeds of the drive. I also had zero luck finding drivers so I guess it is a good thing it "just works" out of the box.  Right now I have it installed in a EZDIY PCI-E 3.0 M.2 SSD Adapter Card.  I've had zero issues so far with both the adapter and the Toshiba SSD.

 

All in all, I feel pretty lucky to pick a sweet deal on this SSD, it was exactly what I was looking for without having to sacrifice a boat load of money.  Now we will just have to wait and see how long it will last...