Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Toshiba OCZ RD400 Series Solid State Drive, PCIe NVMe M.2 1TB & Add-in Card (RVD400-M22280-1T-A)

Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2016

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )Verified Purchase

I installed this super -fast OCZ RD400 solid state drive (SSD) which I inserted in a slot on the motherboard of a Windows 10 desktop PC that I want to use as a gateway to access remotely from my laptop.

Copying files, downloading software and loading audio and video are tasks that are slow and tie up my laptop so my plan is to off-load them to a fast remote machine which is where this hard drive comes into play. For details of installation read below, but the end result is this SSD exceeded my requirements for a much faster drive.

This device comes mounted on a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) card. Unlike a SATA solid state drive, this unit is plugged directly into the system bus through the motherboard. This avoids bottlenecks inherent with the SATA interface.

Installation consists of simply inserting the card into place. I tried to install Windows 10 from a DVD onto the SSD as un-allocated space. The installation went smoothly at first then failed when it tried to re-boot. Microsoft can be glitchy, so I repeated the process several times but had the same result.

After searching the internet I found a site (tinker try dot com) that suggested the problem was caused by the fact that many SSD drives, like this one, use a newer way of organizing their storage space called GPT (GUID Partition Table -- which stands for Globally Unique Identifier).

GPT is superior to the old MBR (master boot record) but it presents some compatibility issues, particularly in older machines. Drives with GPT partitions can be used with most modern 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, but can only be used as a boot drive in computers with 64-bit operating systems that also support UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface).

The Windows installation process recognizes the SSD and automatically sets it up using GPT but then after re-booting it doesn’t recognize it. The site referenced above provided the solution which is to create a USB installation drive that is also partitioned using GPT.

After creating the USB installer using the free tool recommended on the site noted above, I booted and then Windows 10 installed in a little over twenty minutes without incident. Afterwards a re-start took only 32 seconds instead of the one minute twelve seconds from the original spinning drive.

So now that Windows is installed a Microsoft driver automatically is loaded to access the SSD. But, the instructions that were enclosed with the SSD suggest using the Toshiba driver because it is faster. So, I went to the site (OCZ) noted in the instructions and downloaded and installed the Toshiba driver and it went smoothly.

Then I downloaded the SSD utility from the same site and ran it to ensure that the Toshiba driver replaced the Microsoft driver, which it did. As a real world test of the speed of the new drive against the original I created and formatted a 100 GB NTFS partition that took four minutes. Then I created the same size partition on the original drive, and it took 35 minutes to finish.

As another test I copied a 1 GB file from a location on to another on the spinning drive and it took 3.43 seconds. Copying the same file from the spinning drive to the SSD took 2.1 seconds. Copying that file from one location to another on the SSD took 1.42 seconds.

The benchmark from the SSD utility downloaded from the OCZ site shows sequential read of 1.7 GB/s and sequential write of 721.4 MB/s which is faster than the SATA SSD drive I am using on another computer.

Since the manufacturer claims the PCIe interface is much faster than the SATA, I further compared this drive with the SATA by running a free diagnostic tool against both drives. The new SSD got a score of 2411.14 MB/s and the SATA SSD scored 261.3 MB/s.

Although I am not using this machine for gaming I loaded Microsoft Flight Simulator X is a pig. It is disk and CPU intensive but it loaded in ten seconds. It took two minutes and forty-five seconds on my computer with the SATA SSD but never played without getting hung-up. With the new drive Missions completed smoothly without the dreaded buffering.

For my remote gateway use the improvement in speed has increased the usability of my network.

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Dean

Works great.. don't be fooled by the other reviews

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2016

Verified Purchase

Everyone was making me feel like this was going to fry my motherboard.. I have an asus Z170-AR and I put it in and it worked like a champ. Don't let others scare you out of this purchase. Do your homework, and install the OS correctly, I watched a YouTube video on how to just in case, and this drive will run as it should. It takes some fumbling in bios, but the speed of this drive makes it worth your while, I even saw an increase in speed going from a samsung 850 evo ssd. Just do your homework, and don't eat a meal on your motherboard and everything will be just fine. A SCREW and the SPACER are NOT provided, and this really sucks, but realize that if you buy this and you threw away all of your old MB components and screws, you may have to look online for some. The correct screw size is 2x3mm. I was lucky enough to find a spacer and screw meant for this purpose in a small bag left over from my MB, trust me its a bigger deal than you think. Heat + cranking down your drive that is no bigger than a stick of gum will likely bend and break your new drive. This is especially true when you go to install it. It installs at a 45 degree angle, which is really weird so if you have not seen it before look it up, trust me.. then you have to tighten the drive itself down to the MB, so again the screw and spacer are important. Something else that came up was a gummy pad that was included with the drive, this is just a thermal pad and if you are ordering this drive alone without the card, you will see what I mean. It is just to help disperse heat through the back of the card. If you want a NVME drive but a $300-600 dollar Samsung isnt your style, get this one. It even uses some Samsung components in it. I booted up my computer today and i could have sworn it was up from a cold start in like 7 seconds. If you are an enthusiast and shaving time off of your boot time is what you are looking for, then this drive is right for you. If you are not and just want something that is easier to install, work with, and find help with, (like my mom), then you've gone too far. This will be a headache for you. Go back to SATA SSD cards, they are cheaper, and to be honest less of a headache.

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C. V.

Don't install the Toshiba drivers if your MOBO has native NVME support! Good drive, bad drivers.

Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2016

Verified Purchase

I really like this drive, but think twice before using the Toshiba driver. The drive itself is fast, very small (almost unbelievably so), and OS installation and everything went swimmingly. My BIOS recognized it immediately (ASUS X-99 Deluxe II, I-7 6900). The ASUS BIOS has built-in NVME support, and I believe this to be the source of the problem.

After OS installation (Windows 10 Pro), and a lot of other software, the most recent updates, etc., I recalled reading that sometimes the Toshiba driver can enhance the performance of this drive, so I installed it.

I have never seen so many Blue Screens of Death in my life, and I fiddle with my computers all of the time. Dozens of different failures commenced within minutes of installing the driver. The errors varied, and it didn't repeat itself, so troubleshooting was a bear. I went back to an earlier restore point... crash. I scanned the system files and tried to repair... crash. I "refreshed" Windows. Crash. I "reverted" to an earlier version... Crash. Finally, I formatted and reinstalled. Everything is fine!

I decided to try the driver again. On a clean version of Windows (no 3rd party software, no updates), I tried the Toshiba driver immediately. CRASH! BSD! :( over and over. Again, a clean format and reinstall...everything smooth as silk. I'm not letting the Toshiba drivers anywhere near my system again without some sort of ironclad Toshiba guarantee of compatibility and a perceived benefit for doing so. 4 stars for a drive, no stars for the support/drivers.

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Jeff

Fast M.2 drive that boots Windows 10 in <10 seconds installs OS in 10 mins & required no extra drivers, Bios setup or utilities.

Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2018

Verified Purchase

Fast drive, great price ($204), easy install & good warranty!

When I initially purchased this I was going to just clone my old drive, but that meant I'd have to clear a couple hundred gigs to another location. After looking at all the work that would require knowing Windows 10 would likely invalidate my license, I just decided to do a fresh Windows 10 install then add my applications thinking I would spend a half a day setting it up.

Wow is all I can say! I prepared a USB Windows 10 install stick and powered down. My motherboard is a GIGABYTE AORUS GA-AX370-Gaming K7 (AMD Ryzen AM4/ X370/ RGB FUSION/ SMART FAN 5/ HDMI/ M.2/ U.2/ USB 3.1 Type-C/ ATX/ DDR4/ Motherboard) and I had to remove the Graphic Card in order to install the Toshiba OCZ RD400 in the M.2 slot. Luckily the screw was already installed on the board so I only had to remove it plug the RD400 in and re-insert the screw then re-install the graphic card.

I had anticipated having to fiddle in the BIOS to set the boot to the USB stick and then set the order to the RD400 etc., but to my surprise the motherboard defaulted to boot the Windows 10 USB install stick and immediately saw the RD400 and proceeded to be the quickest most flawless Windows 10 install I've ever experienced. Within 20 minutes I already had the OS and a few applications done and to date it's been the fastest Windows install in my 30+ years of PC installations. Damn I love it when everything goes perfect and fast!

I'm not going to waste my time & drive hours running speed statistics test because I'm happy with it as it is. My only concern was temperatures, since that will affect the life and/or throttling of the RD400..

Having the RD400 installed beneath my RX480 Strix card was a concern and I found by using the RD400 temperature in my fan curves for the intake fans pointing directly towards the RD400 & Strix card from the front and bottom of the case brought the temperatures to a manageable level between 47- 54C under load. Note: The graphic card triple fan seems to lower the RD400 a few degrees too, so keep that fan curve in mind while setting your temperature goals.

I wanted to stay well under the RD400's reported throttling temperatures and extend the life of the drive. The RD400 was hitting 68 degrees prior to my custom fan curve setup which was too high.

Temperatures never go above 54C now using Noctua Fan with Focused Flow and SSO2 Bearing, Retail Cooling NF-F12 iPPC 3000 PWM intakes set to 1000RPM at 47C with a steep curve that levels out at 54C in the high teens, but I'm still considering adding an additional heat-sink so I can lower the air intake speed and increase cooling capacity.

Overall at the moment this RD400 512GB drive seems to be a good bang for the buck.

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RINPHUN

I think i will return this. This does not ...

Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2016

Verified Purchase

I think i will return this. This does not show up in my alienware 15 R3.

These are the following things I have tried:

1) checked in disk manager, device manager, my computer...does not show up here.
2) do not get a pop up in computer manager to initialize the disk.
3) Only appears in bios
4) tried enabling/disabling secure mode or using legacy boot, AHCI enable/diable etc.. Does not work.
5) tried memory diagnostic. Does not show any errors or see the drive.
6) tried 3rd part disk manager. Does not show the ssd.
7) diskpart tool in windows as well as intel rapid storage do not show the ssd.
If I am missing anything. Let me know. I would really appreciate it. Otherwise this drive is going back to toshiba.

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Raul G.

Insane IOPS!

Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2016

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )Verified Purchase

Good, sweet baby hey-Zeus this is one screaming fast SSD! I recently installed this SSD in my custom-PC and after some initial testing and benchmarking (and my eyes popping out of my head) I decided to go ahead and make the RD400 my primary OS drive.

'Installation:
You essentially have two options:

1. Use the PCIe interface on the card and an open slot on your motherboard.
OR
2. Remove the M.2 SSD from the card and install it on an open M.2 slot on your motherboard.

The process for installing an M.2 SSD is very straightforward, you'll just need a Philips screwdriver and a steady hand. Remove the screw from the motherboard's standoff slide the M.2 SSD into place and it will snap in. Gently push down on the SSD and install the screw back on the standoff securing the SSD. That's it!

Assuming most folks looking at a piece of technology like this already know how to initialize a disk I'll skip over that part. I'll just say that aside from the physical installation being slightly different simply because of the interface of PCIe or M.2, installing this SSD is exactly like installing any new drive. I had no issues or surprises installing this on my Windows 10 machine.

'Performance:
Toshiba claims a sequential read/write of (up to) 2,600/1,600 MB/s respectively. Using ATTO Disk Benchmark (freeware tool) my results were a relatively steady ~1,000+ MB/s write and ~1,600 MB/s read. I've attached a picture of my results to my review.

The speed of this drive is just... well, the numbers speak for themselves. After I ran a few benchmark tests I decided to move my OS over to the OCZ SSD. My trusty Samsung 850 Evo has been relegated to other tasks for the time being.

'Notes:
If you're considering this SSD for your primary OS and need to move from one disk to this one, note that there is no cloning software included in the package or available via download from the drive's homepage. You'll likely want to have a utility that you've some experience with in order to clone your existing OS disk.

EDIT 7/6/2016:
Removed section on firmware update. The available update (as of this review) is actually a driver update.

21 people found this helpful

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Wakizashi

One of the best NVMe SSDs available

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2016

Verified Purchase

One of the best NVMe SSDs available.
Benefits:
- MLC NAND flash memory. It's much more durable for the intensive use, than Samsung V-NAND or Micron 3D NAND. In real life experience, I have number of Intel and OCZ MLC drives, which have petabytes of data written to them, and still working flawlessly. While 2 first Samsung EVO (TLC) drives are almost dead already.
- Faster than previos leader - Samsung 950 Pro, with exception of very rare (yet) new Samsung 960 Pro, which promise 3200/2000 MB/s R/W speeds :)
- Thermal control. 950 Pro may heat up to 105 degrees C, while this one starts thermal throttling at approx. 70 degrees.
- Single-sided 512 GB model is best for cooling, and best with performance.
Disadvantages:
- PCIe adapter for RD400 is overpriced, as it does not provide necessary cooling (provided small piece of thermal pad is just a joke). Highly recommended to use PCIe->M2 adapter with heatsink, like Sintech one (ASIN B00QZ0WMK0) or buy any chinese PCIe-NVMe adapter (cheap as dirt - 3-5$) and use DIY heatsink.

Notes:
- Beware of on-board M2 sockets - to get maximum speed from the drive, these must be Gen.3 - 32Gbps (PCIe gen 3 x4). Some mobo vendors provides only 10Gbps M2 sockets, connected to PCH, rather than CPU's PCIe. Especially that true for systems, designed for CPUs with 16x PCIe lanes (all middle and low-end Intel Core CPUs). And even for Socket 2011 v3 CPUs, which are able to support up to 40 PCIe lanes, motherboard may not have all of them available via PCIe slots. I would always recommend to use E5-1600 series instead of Core i7 (better feature/price balance, capable for ECC RAM - critical for workstations).
- There is a better option now - Samsung 960 Pro, but... These are announced but I never seen it in shops. The only seller at Amazon have these "out of stock", so looks like there are some problems with first of these new ultra-fast V-NAND SSDs... Hope, not like with smartphones from same vendor ;)

34 people found this helpful

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M. Dillon

Solid performer with basic random read tests, but can run hot

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2017

Verified Purchase

With the provisio that I've only done basic sequential and random tests, and not done any major wear or durability tests, the Toshiba behaves very close to the Samsung 960 EVO and even has better random read bandwidths at 32KB block size or greater. It isn't as good as the Samsung 951 though, and the 'OCZ' branding brings back nightmares (not sure why Toshiba bought use of the name, it has such a poor reputation!). In anycase, the Toshiba ramps up consistently with larger block size and further ramps up with deeper queues.

Note that the device hardware supports 7 queues, so a 16-thread test will run a queue depth of approximately 2 and a 64-thread test will run a queue depth of approximately 8.

Write performance is what I would expect from a small M.2 NVMe device, around 200 MBytes/sec sequential, single thread, 64KB block size. The tests below are read tests.

Basically I like it, 5 stars but with the provisio above.

nvme3: <NVME-PCIe> mem 0xc7300000-0xc7303fff irq 40 at device 0.0 on pci4
nvme3: mapped 8 MSIX IRQs
nvme3: NVME Version 1.1 maxqe=65536 caps=000000302803ffff
nvme3: Model TOSHIBA-RD400 BaseSerial Z6TS10AUTPEV nscount=1
nvme3: Request 64/32 queues, Returns 7/7 queues, rw-sep map (7, 7)
nvme3: Interrupt Coalesce: 100uS / 4 qentries
nvme3: Disk nvme3 ns=1 blksize=512 lbacnt=500118192 cap=238GB serno=Z6TS10AUTPEV-1

randread /dev/nvme1s1b <blksize> 100 16
16 threads - TOSHIBA OCZ RD400 (16 GB area fill with uncompressable /dev/urandom data)
blksize aggregate bw
------ --------------
512 69 MBytes/sec (105 MB/s @ 64 threads)
1024 137 MBytes/sec (211 MB/s @ 64 threads)
2048 273 MBytes/sec (423 MB/s @ 64 threads)
4096 549 MBytes/sec (843 MB/s @ 64 threads)
8192 690 MBytes/sec (947 MB/s @ 64 threads)
16384 1056 MBytes/sec (1014 MB/s @ 64 threads)
32768 1332 MBytes/sec (1120 MB/s @ 64 threads)
65536 1320 MBytes/sec (1241 MB/s @ 64 threads)
131072 1482 MBytes/sec (1494 MB/s @ 64 threads)
262144 1459 MBytes/sec (1494 MB/s @ 64 threads)

I decided to dock the Toshiba one star because although it was a solid performer, I ran a full-on multi-threaded read test and the reported temperature of the Toshiba SSD went up to 81C. This is a read-test, mind you. The Toshiba should have throttled it, or flagged the temperature, and did not. Temperature regulation is important because hot flash chips result in early failures. None of the other NVMe devices under test got that hot (the Samsung 951 topped out at 76C, the 960 EVO stayed at a cool 62C, and the Intel 600P flagged auto-throttled at 75C - I don't recommend the Intel, by the way).

-Matt

13 people found this helpful

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Underwater Surfer

I am returning this drive because of performance and booting issues

Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2016

Verified Purchase

I am returning this drive because of performance and booting issues. It is compatible as a boot drive with my fairly new computer, which has Windows 10 boot times of about 15 seconds when using a SATA III SSD with read speeds of over 500MB/s. To use the OCZ RD400 drive, I cloned my current boot SSD to it using Acronis True Image 2017, changed the boot order in the UEFI, and booted to it. It worked fine, so I ran the free ATTO benchmark and got results that were inline with what is listed from Toshiba for this 256GB SSD, which are really fast! I installed the Toshiba OCZ RD400 driver and that worked as well.

During use I got a "High power loss" error via the OCZ SSD Utility software, and again a few hours later I got the same error. I couldn't find any information via the SSD Utility, Google, or from Toshiba as to what this error meant. The temperature of the RD400 was listed in the SSD Utility as 37 C, so that was good.

I rebooted many times, and shut down the computer many times before rebooting as well, to test everything. The boot times were never any better than my current SSD and many times they were very slow, taking minutes. The boots were normal sometimes, and other times I would get errors from Windows. I have the latest Windows updates installed and the latest BIOS for my motherboard. I spent a few more hours trying to figure out what was causing the problems but was unsuccessful.

Applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Excel, and Word opened a bit faster, but they already open quickly with my SATA III SSD, so I don't think the few seconds gained are worth the cost of an NVMe drive for me. Others are having great results, so you might as well.

6 people found this helpful

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DangFineGuy

Holly Cow This Thing Is Fast!

Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2016

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )Verified Purchase

Up front I received this drive in exchange for an honest and impartial review, and believe me, I take my responsibility to readers very seriously.

I’ve been using this Toshiba OCZ RD400 series NVMe M.2 SSD with the included PCIe 4x add adapter for 3 weeks and wow! Where a good quality conventional SSD is capable of transferring data at roughly 500 MB/s, Toshiba advertises this drive’s transfer rate at 2.6GB/s (sequential, 2.1GB/s random) and assures that there no SATA bottlenecks by providing a PCIe 4x adapter.

Toshiba provides a nice little SSD (OCZ only) management and benchmark utility so that you can test the drive’s performance in your system. In my 5th generation i5 system the benchmark shows that I’m getting 2.2GB/s reads and 740MB/s writes (see photo). What that means is that my 5th generation i5 desktop goes from power on to a Windows 10 login screen in 10 seconds. This thing is just blazing fast!

At first glance, the cost per megabyte may seem a bit high, but you don’t use an SSD like this for data (unless you have the budget for the 1TB version). You use it for the operating system and for critical applications and keep your data on an economical spinner-drive or a large conventional SSD. So bottom line – 5 Stars, just like I could never go back to booting from a spinning drive, after this experience, I don’t think I could go back to booting from an ordinary SSD.

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