Toshiba starts shipping big capacity 2TB NVMe solid state drive

Toshiba is expanding its XG5 line of high-performance NVMe SSDs with a new XG5-P model (P is for premium) that doubles the capacity to 2TB, the company announced. The drive is already shipping to OEM customers in limited quantities, and Toshiba plans to ramp up production for wider availability in the first quarter of next year.

This latest entry in the XG5 series uses the same 64-layer, 3D BiCS flash (TLC) memory as previous drives, but with improved performance metrics. Utilizing the PCIe bus, the XG5-P boasts up to 3,000MB/s of sequential reads and up to 2,200MB's sequential writes. Random read and write performance checks in at up to 320,000 IOPs and 265,000 IOPs, respectively.

These metrics are significantly higher than even the fastest SATA-based SSDs, as NVMe drives have the benefit of shuttling data through the speedier PCIe bus. It doesn't matter for gaming much, though if you also perform a lot of file transfers on your PC, the added performance is a real boon.

The drives are housed in the standard M.2 2280 form factor that resembles a stick of gum. Toshiba is planning to also make a 1TB version of the XG5-P, and will also have self-encrypting drive (SED) models supporting TCG Opal Version 2.01.

Toshiba did not say how much these drives cost. The company also didn't mention if it will sell these as standalone drives to consumers, of if they'll only be offered to OEMs and available in prebuilt systems and laptops.

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).