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When thinking about which SSD to buy Transcend might not be the first name that springs to mind but they have been in the Flash storage game for many years. They have a range of SSD's for both consumer and industrial market segments using a variety of controllers and NAND. The current flagship of the consumer SSD's is the SSD370.
The SSD370 is available in both 2.5in, 7mm and mSATA (MSA370) formats and there is a choice of materials for the enclosure of the 2.5in version; either either aluminium (the 370S) or plastic. The plastic version weighs in at 52g, some 11g lighter than the metal version.
The family is made up of 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and the flagship 1TB models. The mSATA versions have the same capacities but adds in an entry level 16GB drive.
Endurance figures for SSD370 are very good ranging from 45TBW for the 32GB drive up to an impressive 1,180TBW for the 1TB drive. The 512GB drive has a 550TBW which works out at around 502GB of writes a day for the duration of the drives three year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB.
NAND Components: 16nm Micron Synchronous MLC
Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III)
Form Factor: 2.5in 7mm
NAND Controller: Transcend (Silicon Motion)
Dimensions: 100.00 x 69.85 x 6.8mm
Drive Weight: 52g
Firmware Version O0918
The front of the Transcend SSD370S box has a small list of the drives features as well as the capacity clearly labelled.
The rear of the box has a small list of the drives specifications, a list of what is in the box and a bullet point list of features in a multitude of languages.
Inside the box there is a 2.5in to 3.5in mounting bracket, mounting screws, a quick installation guide and a warranty card.
Transcend's SSD370S sits inside a 7mm chassis (6.8mm to be precise) and its built on a 2.5in format weighing in at 52g and measuring 100.00 x 69.85 x 6.8mm.
The chassis is held together with four screws, two of which are in plain sight, the other two sitting under the void warranty warning sticker on each side of the drive. Three tiny screws hold the PCB in place and undoing these frees the board.
The top side of the PCB of the SSD370S 512GB holds eight 16nm Synchronous MLC NAND packages labelled TFGDMZT-1D04. That code seemed to be a bit of a mystery but Transcend confirmed to us that its was in fact 16mn Micron NAND.
Turning the PCB over reveals another eight NAND packages, the controller chip and a single Samsung cache chip. The controller is branded Transcend TS6500 but is in reality a re-badged Silicon Motion SM2246EN 4 channel controller with Transcend custom written firmware.
Transcend have their own SSD toolbox utility called SSD Scope which can be downloaded from the companies website. This is divided into four sections; Status shows drive information, S.M.A.R.T details, capacity (used and remaining) and drive life.
The Tool section has a performance tester, secure erase facility and both quick and full scan options for the drive. System Clone does what it says on the tin as does the firmware update section.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
Intel Core i7 4790K with 16GB of DDR3-2133 RAM, GTX980 and an ASRock Extreme 6 motherboard.
Other Drives:
Crucial BX100 500GB
Crucial MX100 512GB
Crucial MX200 500GB
Intel SSD730 480GB
Kingston HyperX 3K 480GB
OCZ Trion 100 480GB
OCZ Trion 150 480GB
Patriot Ignite 480GB
PNY CS2111 XLR8 480GB
Samsung 830 512GB
Samsung 840DC EVO 480GB
Samsung 840DC PRO 400GB
SanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB
Seagate 600 480GB
SK Hynix Canvas SL300 512GB
SK Hynix Canvas SL301 500GB
Toshiba THNSNF512GCSS 512GB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
AS SSD.
IOMeter
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.
The 512GB SSD370S shows pretty good all round performance although the controller does show a preference towards compressed data particularly when in write mode.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
Tested with the ATTO benchmark, the 512GB SSD370S matches the official Transcend figure of 560MB/s for reads however the benchmark score of 442MB/s for writes is a little shy of the official 460MB/s.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
The AS SSD benchmark uses incompressible data to test drives. On the whole the Transcend/ Silicon Motion controller deals with it well, the 4K write performance being particularly strong , however the same can't really be said when it comes to 4K reads.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.
We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable.
The impressive 4K write performance continues under the IOMeter benchmark, the drive producing a score of 75108 IOPS in the random read test, bang on the official number of 75000 IOPS. Once again the 4K read isn't quite as convincing producing 71710 IOPS, a little way off the official figure of 75K.
Although the Transcend SSD370 512GB may be have been around for a while its still a worthy addition to any list of 500GB class drives being considered for purchasing.
Its overall performance is pretty good for a mainstream drive with particularity strong sequential read and 4K write performance although it doesn't deal with 4K reads as well as some of its competitors. It has a first rate endurance figure however the three year warranty in these days of five and even ten year ones seems a bit stingy.
Transcend SSD drives tend to difficult to find in the UK but Ballicon have the the Transcend SSD370S 512GB available and priced at £132.60 inc vat HERE.
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Pros
- Decent performance for its class.
- Very good endurance.
- Competitive price.
Cons
- 3 year warranty is very limited by today's standards.
Kitguru says: Transcend may not be a name that springs to mind when thinking SSD's but the 512GB SSD370S is a well priced drive with decent all-round performance.
