The Toshiba OCZ RC100 pulls out all the stops when it comes to cost-optimization for solid-state drives. All this revolves around Toshiba's new highly integrated KBG30ZPZ controller, which combines NAND flash and the controller itself in a single package to save a ton of space as flash chips are no longer needed on the PCB, making for an extremely compact design. For SSD manufacturers that don't produce their own NAND (like Toshiba does indeed), things get easier, too. They no longer have to source multiple components from various vendors, which might be in limited supply. Rather, the supply chain is greatly simplified to just a single IC, a PCB, and some readily available glue components.

Pricing for the controller itself should also be lower than for competing designs as the interface width has been reduced to PCI-Express x2 instead of x4, which makes internal design easier, although at the cost of reduced maximum transfer speeds. The biggest change in the RC100 that also affects users is that the drive is a DRAM-less design. We talked about this in detail on earlier pages of this review; basically, getting rid of the DRAM chip reduces production cost by a few dollars on top of all the other cost-cutting. The issue here is that it's not easy to build an SSD that can work without DRAM—smart software algorithms are needed to keep performance acceptable. OCZ also makes use of NVMe's Host Memory Buffer feature that allocates a small portion of system RAM for the SSD to use, which results in better performance.

When it comes to reading data off the drive, our synthetic testing shows good numbers that are on par with other NVMe SSDs, especially random read IOPS are sky high and better than most drives in our test group. Sequential reads reach 1500 MB/s, which is good enough, especially for a drive connected via PCIe x2. Sequential writes are decent too, with about 1 GB/s. The big challenge for DRAM-less SSDs are small random writes, and the RC100 is no exception. When benched with our regular test area size of 128 GB, we saw pathetic numbers (that, of course, are still much better than with a HDD) that are nowhere near what we've come to expect from modern SSDs. After some consideration, we added a second data point for these results, testing at a smaller size of 16 GB, which should be more in-line with what the RC100 will see in actual usage. At this smaller test size, the RC100 does an order of magnitude better, reaching speeds that are comparable to the fastest SATA drives (still a factor of two or three lower than the best NVMe drives). Nearly all of today's write-intensive consumer applications fall into just two categories: large sequential writes (ISO/game/disc image/video copy, large software installation) and small random writes (small software installation, extracting or copying lots of small files). These small random writes are what trouble DRAM-less SSDs, but they are localized to a small subset of the total disk space. Other applications do write to larger disk areas, but are constrained by the rate at which they can generate data (for example, BitTorrent downloads). In the enterprise world, things are different of course. Large databases with many concurrent writers are the norm, so are busy file servers with many connected clients, for which the RC100 is definitely not an option.

Our real-life testing using actual applications shows the RC100 in a much more favorable light. While it does see a performance penalty in WinRAR extraction (writing many small files), it delivers excellent performance numbers in all other tests due to its good read and sequential write performance. The results clearly show that pure synthetic testing is not good enough to assess the performance of a modern SSD. When averaged over all real-life tests, we see OCZ's RC100 within a few percent of the other NVMe drives, sitting roughly in the middle of the pack.

Currently available for $155, the Toshiba OCZ RC100 is not unreasonably priced for a PCIe x2 NVMe drive, ending up in the top third when it comes to price/performance and price per GB. However, competition has gotten tough for NVMe drives, too, and all the following SSDs have DRAM, so they will perform well in a wider range of usage scenarios. The ADATA SX8200 is just $140 and beats the RC100 in every regard. If you feel you can live with SATA interface speeds but want the compactness of M.2, then the Crucial MX500 at $110 could be an option. 500 GB-class 2.5" SATA SSDs are available for well below $100; our recommendation here is the Crucial MX500, too, which offers much better price/performance than pretty much everything on the market. So to me, it looks like Toshiba needs to bring the price of the RC100 480 GB down to $125, where it becomes the most affordable NVMe drive with decent performance for consumer workloads. At that price point, buyers of SATA drives will get lured in by the high sequential transfer speeds, too, which would have many pay the price premium willingly. I don't doubt for a second that Toshiba can make such a price point happen as all components are sourced in-house, so there should be tons of margin left in this product because of all the cost-reduction techniques employed.