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.