In 2017, Toshiba was the first vendor to ship 64-layer 3D NAND in the consumer SSD market with their XG5 NVMe SSD. Now a little over a year later, the XG6 is the first SSD with 96-layer 3D NAND. The new generation of flash memory allows for better performance, improved power efficiency, and lower costs.

As the high-end tier of Toshiba's OEM SSD product line, the XG series is not officially available for retail purchase, but we think this one is pretty likely to be used as the starting point for a retail product. The last XG series drive with a retail counterpart was the XG3, the planar MLC-based sibling to the OCZ RD400. Toshiba's low-end NVMe BG series of single-chip BGA SSDs also got a retail version in the Toshiba RC100, mounted on a M.2 2242 card. Retail and OEM versions usually have some firmware differences and occasionally one or two significant hardware differences such as 19nm vs 15nm MLC for the XG3 and RD400, or 30mm vs 42mm card length for the BG3 and RC100. Despite those differences, OEM SSDs are usually a pretty accurate preview of later retail versions.