Conclusion
Toshiba's XG3 is a good OEM storage product that should deliver years of high performance. If you spend the extra money now to get one of these in your notebook (or two in RAID 0, which is how MSI uses them), you shouldn't feel compelled to upgrade anytime soon.
Running out of space is another matter entirely. NAND costs dropped over the last year, and we expect even larger cuts once Toshiba, Micron and SK Hynix roll out their 3D architectures later this year. Toshiba plans to release BiCS 2 after its first generation of 3D didn't pan out as expected. The setback will almost assuredly put Toshiba behind its competition, even though it has the upper hand in 15nm planar NAND. The company can produce more flash per wafer, so its costs are lower.
Vendors that rely on the upgrade market to sell SSDs should be concerned about Toshiba's XG3. Its performance is close to the best drives available today, and most of the systems we've seen with the XG3 are high-end "gaming" notebooks. The folks who buy them are also the ones who drop expensive aftermarket parts into their PCs.
It will be interesting to see what OCZ does with Toshiba's TC58NCP0706SB controller. At CES, we saw a 512GB drive reading sequential data at 2600 MB/s and writing at over 1600 MB/s. That is already higher than the performance OCZ claims. It's also higher than what Samsung achieves with the SM951-NVMe and retail 950 Pro. Neither of Samsung's client-focused drives ships in a 1TB capacity (yet), so OCZ has a serious shot at selling the best M.2 SSD out there. It'll need to launch the drive before Samsung's 48-layer flash sprouts a 950 Pro 1TB.
Even with a 950 Pro on the market, Samsung's V-NAND (3D) is expensive. The new 48-layer flash will increase density per die, but Samsung will not want to get in a price war with Toshiba's 15nm MLC as soon as its new V-NAND emerges. OCZ has a long history of using pricing to overcome minor issues. If the RevoDrive 400 fails to compare to 950 Pro-level performance, then it could be a great value that chisels away at the price of NVMe-enabled SSDs.
MORE: Best SSDs For The Money
MORE: Latest Storage News
MORE: Storage in the Forums
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.