Toshiba's tiny BG4 SSDs have a renewed sense of speed
by from Techreport on (#46N69)
Toshiba's ball-grid-array SSDs offer OEMs a tempting blend of low cost, small size, and energy efficiency, but thus far those perks have come at the cost of speed. Historically, the company's BG-series drives skipped onboard DRAM and depended on NVMe's Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature to offset the performance implications of that omission. However, as we saw when we reviewed the BG3's consumer-facing cousin, the RC100, HMB isn't a perfect substitute for good ol' memory chips. Toshiba acknowledges that fact and consequentially equipped BG3 drives with only a two-lane PCIe link.
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