How NVMe SSDs Keep You in the “Game!”

Gone are the days of having only one or two choices of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVM Express®/NVMe) SSDs, and with so many more mobile and desktop motherboard platforms supporting it, now is a great time to join the mainstream.

So What’s So Great About NVMe?

For the last few decades, computer storage has been making great advances in capacity, but performance was far off the pace set by other components like CPUs and GPUs.  Solid-state drives hit the general consumer market a decade ago and in many ways reset our expectations for high performance storage.  The transition to SSDs brought rapid improvements in capabilities, technology, performance and reliability, and when it came to the consumer market it was the enthusiasts and gamers who were among the first to adopt this exciting new technology. Soon however, we found that faster alternatives were needed but the interface was only a part of the issue.

Since the advance host controller interface was originally designed for much slower media it was inefficient for modern SSDs.  So, a new standard was created called NVMHCI (Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface), which when combined with a fast PCIe®interface – gets you NVMe.  Much improved as an interface, it developed around the needs of flash memory, and is optimized to take advantage of the rich pipeline and low latency of the latest SSDs.

Get In the Game!

SSDs are now considered essential components of any modern gaming PC, and regardless of whether that is a mobile or desktop gaming rig, once you experience quicker boot ups, faster level load times, and snappier overall performance, there simply is no going back. Today’s gamer uses their rig for gaming, recording, editing, publishing highlight reels and streaming their experiences in real time. Drives like the Toshiba OCZ RD400 make it easier than ever to enable this kind of multitasking by leveraging this technology with a compact M.2 2280 form factor that is quickly becoming standard on all the high performance motherboard platforms. Say goodbye to cables, simply plug in, install your software, and get in the game.

Toshiba’s OCZ RD400 series of M.2 drives is one of its fastest consumer NVMe SSDs to date, and attaches its high speed to the PCIe Gen3 x4 lane where it is immune to SATA’s analogously low bottleneck.  The RD400 gets back to the brand’s enthusiast roots and offers power-users, gamers, and professionals a cutting-edge storage solution designed to support the complete spectrum of demanding consumer applications. The RD400 outperforms traditional SATA SSDs by over 4.5 times in sequential read (up to 2,600 MB/s1), and over 3 times in sequential write performance (up to 1,600 MB/s2) so your system won’t be deprived of the storage bandwidth your data-intensive workload requires. 3

The RD400 may be compact in form factor but it is big on performance and density, and is available in capacities from 128GB all the way up to 1024GB4, enabling plenty of primary storage and high-end desktop speeds to exist not only in a notebook, but directly on your motherboard without taking up a PCIe slot. For those consumers that are feeling held back by commodity storage hardware the RD400 delivers over 200,000 IOPS5 of random read performance at your beck and call, helping keep you at the top of the performance game.

Contact Us Today

For questions or additional information on Toshiba storage, please contact us at:

[email protected] or visit us at: toshiba.semicon-storage.com.

 

NVM Express are a trademark of NVM Express, Inc.  PCI Express and PCIe are trademarks or registered trademarks of PCI-SIG.

 


1 Sequential read speeds are measured with ATTO v2.47

2 Sequential write speeds are measured with ATTO v2.47

3  This reflects maximum performance of RD400 512GB compared to VT180 480GB. Read and write speed may vary depending on the host device, read and write conditions, and file size.

4 Definition of capacity: Toshiba defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.  A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 230 = 1,073,741,824 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity.  Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, such as Microsoft Operating System and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content.  Actual formatted capacity may vary.

5 IOPS: Input Output Per Second (or the number of I/O operations per second)

 

Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of KIOXIA America, Inc.

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