TOSHIBA Q300 240GB SSD HDTS724AZSTAE

The Toshiba Q300 SSD is a standard internal SATA drive. This means it takes the standard 2.5-inch drive design and slaps a SATA port on one of its sides. Like all SSDs released in the last few years, it supports the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) but will also work with SATA 2 and SATA. The Q300 will fit in any home applications where a standard SATA hard drive, be it a 2.5-inch laptop drive or a 3.5-inch desktop drive, is being used. The Q300 is 7mm thick, but it comes with a 2.5mm spacer in case you need it to perfectly fit into the space of a standard 9.5mm laptop hard drive.

Features

The Q300 supports the common features available in most SSDs, including TRIM and garbage collection. (Read more about SSDs here.) On top of that, it also features an adaptive size SLC write cache technology. Essentially, this technology uses a small portion of fast flash memory, called single-level-cell NAND — the type of memory used in high-end enterprise SSDs — as buffer for faster write operation.

Like other budget SSDs, the Q300 doesn’t support encryption. However, encryption, which protects data in case of theft or loss, is only needed in a corporate or business environment and only works with motherboards that also have this feature. Most home computers don’t support encryption in the first place.