Toshiba's $7000+ 400 GB SSD: SAS 6Gb/s, SLC Flash, And Big Endurance

Power Consumption

Because SSDs in an enterprise environment are assumed to be active 24x7, idle power consumption doesn't receive the emphasis that it might in a desktop or notebook. Even so, it's interesting that Toshiba's enterprise SSD is the only drive that draws more than 1 W without doing anything at all.

When it's busy crunching 4 KB random access, Toshiba's MK4001GRZB uses more than two times the power of Micron's P300. Both drives employ SLC NAND, so the difference isn't necessarily attributable to Toshiba's choice in memory technology.

Switching to sequential accesses, the MK4001GRZB consumes substantially more power than all of the other tested SSDs. 

If you flip back through the performance analysis, you find that, at a queue depth of eight, Intel's SSD 520 is roughly as fast as the Toshiba drive in this very same workload. Compare that to our power numbers and you find that the SandForce-based desktop drive uses a lot less power to achieve similar performance, making it a more efficient solution in read-heavy workloads. 

We see a similar situation evolve in sequential write testing. The P300 outperforms the MK4001GRZB by roughly 19%, yet Toshiba's drive consumes almost 42% more power.

Larger block sizes don’t affect power consumption by much. At a queue depth of eight, 128 KB and 2 MB performance is roughly the same, which means efficiency is, too.