Toshiba throws down gauntlet in battle for cheapest SSDs

Toshiba OCZ TL100

In the battle of increasingly affordable SSDs, Toshiba has a new weapon in the form of a fresh range of value-oriented drives.

Toshiba's OCZ TL100 series comes in 120GB and 240GB capacities, and it's nippy enough for a budget SSD with sequential read speeds of up to 550MB/s and writes of up to 530MB/s. Random read/write performance (4KiB, QD32) is rated at up to 85,000 and 80,000 IOPS respectively.

And on the endurance front, the daily usage guideline is set at 27GB per day for the 120GB model, and 54GB per day for the larger drive – meaning TBW (Total Bytes Written) is rated at 30TB and 60TB respectively over the three-year warranty.

Snappy service

Yes, you get a three-year warranty with both SSDs, and it's one of Toshiba's 'advanced' warranties no less, meaning that if a fault is found with the drive, you'll get a replacement SSD shipped out the next working day, and a prepaid return label to send the defective unit back.

Alex Mei, VP of Marketing, Consumer SSDs & Storage Outbound Marketing at Toshiba America, commented: "The Toshiba OCZ TL100 SATA SSD series demonstrates that 'value' doesn't have to mean end-users need to sacrifice performance or quality. As an affordable upgrade option for home and office users, the TL100 series makes SSD performance and responsiveness more accessible to a wider audience."

Toshiba also provides management software with these SSDs, which gives the user a dashboard boasting a real-time overview of the status of the system, and monitors the health of the TL100. There's also a function to tune up the performance of the drive, and firmware updates are provided to the user.

But of course the most tempting factor here is the price, with the 120GB model weighing in at $45 (around £35, AU$60), and the 240GB drive priced at $68 (around £50, AU$90).

Via: Digital Trends

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).