Introduction

Toshiba is a world-renowned company. Active in many fields, it also produces flash memory, so Toshiba does, just like Micron and Samsung, use their own NAND flash inside their SSDs. They even acquired OCZ a while ago, a more consumer-centric maker of SSDs. For now, Toshiba's own product stack isn't affected by that acquisition.

Today, we have on our test bench the Toshiba HK3R2 960 GB, an enterprise-oriented drive for datacenters. The HK3R2 series is optimized for read-heavy workloads with one Drive Write Per Day of endurance for five years.

Toshiba uses their own 19 nm NAND flash chips (TH58TFT0EFKBA8J) and their own controller (TC358790XBG) with the HK3R2 SSD series. As an enterprise-class drive, the SSD comes with power-loss protection and power-fail management. Two large capacitors provide a little bit of power for the SSD to write all its data to flash in case of a power failure.

The HK3R2 is available in capacities of 120 GB, 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB.

Packaging

We only received the bare drive from Toshiba, and whether there will be any fancy retail packaging for this drive which really doesn't target end-users is yet unknown.

The Drive

The drive conforms to the dimensions set forth by the 2.5" form factor. It is made of metal to improve its durability and is only 7 mm thick, which makes it compatible with Intel's Ultrabook specification.


Like most recent SSDs, the Toshiba HK3R2 uses the SATA 6 Gbps interface. It is compatible with any older SATA standard, but will, in such a case, work at reduced performance.


You will find the SSD controller and eight flash chips on the PCB. A DRAM chip is also present; it provides the SSD controller with RAM. You can also see the two large shiny capacitors that provide just enough power in case of a power loss for the controller to write its data to flash.


Toshiba uses their own TC358790XBG controller. It is an updated version of the one within the HG5d series of SSDs.


The eight MLC flash chips, produced by Toshiba, are built on a 19 nanometer process.