The Toshiba/Kioxia BG4 1TB SSD Review: A Look At Your Next Laptop's SSD
by Billy Tallis on October 18, 2019 11:30 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
With the Light test, the Toshiba/Kioxia BG4 is back to outperforming its predecessors, but it isn't providing a challenge to most of the high-end drives. The full-drive performance of the BG4 is better than most entry-level drives and beats some high-end drives.
The 99th percentile latency from the BG4 during the Light test is much higher when the test is run on a full drive, but the disparity is nowhere near as large as for most of the other entry-level NVMe drives. The average latency scores are all better than the mainstream SATA drive.
The average read and write latencies from the BG4 during the Light test are both fine. The writes are more clearly slower than high-end drives, but are still quick enough to have minimal effect on perceived performance.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies for the BG4 on the Light test both show considerably higher latency for the full-drive test runs, but the latency doesn't get completely out of control. Worst-case write latency ends up only a little bit slower than the Crucial MX500.
The BG4 again stands out with much better energy efficiency than the rest of the drives in this bunch, providing a clear improvement over the earlier RC100 thanks primarily to much higher performance.
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intelati - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
That last image is absolutely ridiculous. You get good performing 1TB of SSD storage on a postage stand.Jesus H Christ.
MaxUserName - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
No, BG4 have too poor performance:https://www.storagereview.com/toshiba_bg4_nvme_ssd...
Ratman6161 - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
I took a quick look at your link but quit looking when I saw they were testing SQL Server as one of their tests and with 15,000 virtual users. Completely useless use case. Even if you are are a software developer running a local copy of SQL Server, you won't be testing 15K users. So its performance somewhat pales in comparison to many full size m.2 SSD's. There are trade-offs to every component and in a laptop, particularly a thin and light laptop, those trade-offs usually have to favor saving space and power efficiency. It accomplishes those two goals on its own plus the smaller size may enable a larger battery in some systems. so what if your 2 TB 970 Evo outperforms it. The people buying the systems where this would be used won't care. It seems pretty ideally suited to its target audience.Tams80 - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
I second that being a silly review.This is, as the article here states multiple times, for space-constrained devices. The BG4 more than meets the needs of these. As a bonus to us as customers, it means manufacturers are less likely to solder down the SSDs, so we can actually replace/upgrade them.
0ldman79 - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
We're looking at a review right now.It's not as fast as NVME but it's faster than SATA on most benchmarks.
It's a quarter size of most NVME drives.
svan1971 - Saturday, October 19, 2019 - link
Lord, learn how to spell stamp, amen.wenart - Sunday, October 20, 2019 - link
Does Jesus have a second name?Jambe - Thursday, October 24, 2019 - link
Hieronymus, obviously.ToTTenTranz - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
The Smach-Z uses a 2230 M.2 NVMe slot.Just saying.
Kishoreshack - Friday, October 18, 2019 - link
Excellent reviewdeep dive into the ssd we will get in our laptops
I just hope these form factors become common
&
are adopted for every laptop