The Fujifilm company is best known for its photography products, stretching back in its long history to its respected position as a supplier of photographic film. More recently it has diversified into electronic hardware and media, such as Fujifilm FinePix digital cameras and flash memory. Now the Fujifilm brand is selling solid-state drives for PCs and laptops. See our group test: What’s the best SSD? Two models of SSD are available, the Fujifilm HQ-PC Series reviewed here, and a higher-specification range named Fujifilm HQ-Pro Series. Both ranges include models with capacities of 128, 256 and 512 GB, with the Pro also adding an extra 60 GB option. Both drives resemble closely the Toshiba Q Series SSD from the outside, built around the same slim 7 mm dot-speckled aluminium case, with a large name sticker applied in the centre of the top side. The drive uses 19 nm MLC NAND stock, we’re told, although as with Toshiba SSDs there’s little other information available about the technical specification.
Fujifilm HQ-PC Series 512GB: Performance
We tested the 512 GB capacity HQ-PC Series drive. In the simple ATTO Disk Benchmark test the Fujifilm SSD easily surpassed the 500 MB/s mark, hitting maximums of around 552 MB/s reads and 520 MB/s writes. In CrystalDiskMark we had the first clue that this was not quite identical to a Toshiba Q Series Pro, as while the 32-queue depth 4 kB random read was the same at 373 MB/s – or 95,488 IOPS – the Fujifilm showed conspicuously faster write performance. The Toshiba measured 251 MB/s, while the Fujifilm measured 342 MB/s. In single 4 kB threads, the Fujifilm provided 26 and 120 MB/s reads and writes; the Toshiba 23 and 78 MB/s. In fact, testing a sample of the Fujifilm HQ-Pro we could see that in this test this latter drive is more like the Toshiba Q Series Pro that we tested earlier this year. Looking at IOPS results again, AS SSD benchmark returned results for the Fujifilm HQ-PC that coincided closely with the Toshiba Q Series Pro. Both drives reached effectively the same overal score (999 and 1000 points); and best-case IOPS were 91,767 (Fujifilm) and 91,913 (Toshiba) for 64-thread 4 kB random reads. In terms of 4 kB random writes (QD=32), the drives measured at 58,447 and 58,044 IOPS respectively; close enough to be identical. We are tempted to conclude that the Fujifilm is the same as Toshiba Q Series in terms of components, with a slight tweak in the firmware that could result in the more favourable write performance in CDM’s higher queue-depth random write test. In the AS SSD benchmark test, both drives measured effectively identical in all sub-tests. See our group test: What’s the best SSD? Fujifilm HQ-PC Series 512GB SSD performance
Toshiba Q Series Pro SSD performance
