Toshiba OCZ RC100 240GB Solid State Drive Review

When you think about NVMe solid state drives you typically think of high performance, high cost drives. Well Toshiba has a new class of NVMe drives in their OCZ RC100 series drives that will help bring NVMe drives into the mainstream. These new affordable NVMe drives have a DRAM-less design, but make use of Host Memory Buffer (HMB) which accesses the system DRAM for its own caching space. The drives also make use of a PCIe Gen 3 x2 interface (whereas most NVMe drives use an x4 interface). With that you have sequential read and write speeds of 1600 MB/s and 1050 MB/s respectively. While this speed is not on the level of high-end NVMe drives it is definitely faster than a normal SATA-based solid state drives and much, much faster than a traditional hard drive. Can this be the drive to bring NVMe speeds to the mainstream? Read on as we find out!

Special thanks to Toshiba for providing us with the OCZ RC100 240GB Solid State Drive to review.

Specifications
Capacities: 120GB, 240GB, 480GB
Sequential Read/Write Speed: Up to 1600/1050 MB/s
NAND Flash Memory Type: 64-layer 3D BiCS TLC
Interface: PCI Express® Base Specification Revision 3.1a (PCIe)
Maximum Speed: 16 GT/s (PCIe Gen3x2L)
Command: NVM Express™ Revision 1.2.1 command set
Form Factor: M.2 Type 2242-S3-B-M
Dimension (L x W x H): 42.00 ± 0.15 mm x 22.00 ± 0.15 mm x 2.38 mm
Warranty: 3-Year Standard Warranty

Packaging
The drive comes in a normal retail package that has a picture of the drive on the front and lets us know we have the 240GB version.

Toshiba OCZ RC100

Flipping over to the back we have some features listed, one of the more important ones is that we have a 3-year warranty with this drive.

Toshiba OCZ RC100

Getting everything out of the box we have the OCZ RC100 drive and a quick start guide.

Toshiba OCZ RC100

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