The Toshiba XG6 is introducing 96-layer 3D NAND offering an incremental improvement compared to the previous XG5 drive. Designed for OEMs, the XG6 it offers performance and power efficiency, making it a drop in replacement for devices that have been shipping with the the XG5.

Overall, the drive performed pretty well in our benchmarks, showing a consistent sequential read and write performance above 3GB/s. We are a bit concerned with the relatively low 4K for the category read and write results at first, in QD1. But the drive was super-fast in random 4K read/writes in higher queue depths and in multithreading requests. We also noticed that it lost its lead in the PCmark 7 secondary storage tests and the demanding IOMETER workload we put it through, alklthough the result of the PCMark 8 benchmark was very encouraging.

It seems that the strengths of the XG6 offers show up on difficult benchmarks, being fast at mixed random read/write workloads and full-drive performance in general.

We did not have the chance to put the Toshiba XG6 against all the the top consumer NVMe drives currently on the market, but according to various benchmarks posted online, the XG6 is competitive although it doesn't seem t provide the peak performance offered by a couple of other drives.

In any case, the XG6 is an OEM drive and performs well enough to give any notebook a credible claim to offering high-end storage. We would klike to see a Toshiba 96L 3D TLC NAND SSD for the retail market soon. A good scenario would have Toshiba offering a very cost-effective SSD solution that would compete well against the cheapest 8-channel NVMe SSDs.

There is no retail pricing for the XG6 SSD, so it is difficult to say whether the drive is cost effective. However, the 96L NAND should be an advantage for Toshiba in oterms of OEM adoption.