Gadgetory

during CES we heard that Toshiba is showing off what was likely one of the most exciting SSDs we've seen in a long time remember one of the major complaints about SSDs and particularly nvme based drives is that they're terribly expensive and that was held back by their acceptance into the market okay so the natural the last two years has also contributed to increasing costs but that's another conversation for another time one of the main issues with today's SSDs is that drives our books ended into two extreme ends of performance there's the SATA based drives that have acceptable read and write speeds while the other end holds extra high performance and me me products finding something in the middle ground for an affordable price is extremely challenging but what if I told you that Toshiba has come up with an nvme drive that offers performance levels that blow sada out of the water and they're also aiming to offer it for SATA level pricing now what if I also told you that the way it's being built means it could be immune to the massive pricing in fluctuations we've seen over the last twenty four months well it's time to stand up and take notice because this is the new RC 100 but before I get to that I want to give a huge shout out to fantex Corsair and colormaster for sponsoring our CES 2018 coverage it may not mean much to look at but the RC 100 may change the SSD space in a pretty big way when it launches a bit later this year not only does it use as an ultra-compact m2 twenty to forty two form factor but toshiba has managed to pack capacities of 120 240 and for 80 gigabytes into that small form factor and the price the aim is to offer it for 50 cents per gigabyte or less and for that price it will likely deliver about double the theoretical speeds of the fastest SATA base SSD that's simply amazing so how did Toshiba accomplish this by packing their 64 layer 3d by CS flash memory and controller into a tiny unified package there aren't any individual NAND modules and instead of DRAM for caching purposes they're using a unique host memory buffer technology that ensures the drive remains fast over time all of that is crammed into a chip that's almost the size of a fingernail or a water bottle cap even the power consumption is drastically lower than other separate NAND plus controller setups due to the unique design because of performance metrics that are bit lower than other high-end me drives heat production is reduced as well also don't forget that it will be covered with Toshiba's excellent three year warranty something that has been held over from the OCZ days the number of use cases for the RC 100 is almost infinite because it can be easily adapted to anything from high-end gaming PCs to the smallest thinnest laptops I can actually see it being very popular as a way to get fast storage into both Verizon and coffee lake systems or add in as a quick drop-in upgrade for notebooks with an open nvme slot the other item Toshiba showed was the XS 700 portable SSD it seems like everyone is coming out with one of these I have to say I don't think this one will be much different though pricing is supposed to be very aggressive basically it uses a durable soft touch metal frame that fits perfectly in the palm of your hand along with a USB 3.1 gen2 interface in order to keep costs down while also offering great performance the internal SSD runs on a SATA interface so despite the gen 2 connector speeds will be up to five thirty megabytes per second and 480 megabytes per second for writes supposedly it can also withstand a two meter drop onto concrete surfaces as well so that's pretty awesome so that wraps up our time with Toshiba and I really hope you guys are excited just as I am about the RC 100 it really could be a game-changer in a market that has been waiting for a long time for some affordable excitement I mean but with harbor connects thank you so much for watching stay subscribe for more CES coverage and we'll see you in the next one