Transcend ESD400 256GB External SSD Review

1. Introduction2. Transcend ESD400 256GB3. ATTO/Crystal Disk Mark / AS SSD4. Real LIfe5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

We tested the drive as it comes out of the box, factory formatted as a FAT32 drive.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.

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.

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.

Transcend quote read/write performance for the drive at up to 410MB/s and 380MB/s respectively. Under test conditions that read figure seems a little conservative especially under the ATTO benchmark with the drive producing a read performance of 459MB/s.  However, under the more stringent ASSSD benchmark, the read figure was much closer to the official figure. The write performance under both benchmarks fell somewhat short of the maximum official figure producing 339MB/s under ATTO and 314MB/s with ASSSD.

The drives 4K performance at a queue depth of one is disappointing, producing a 16.65MB/s read figure with writes coming in at 39.86MB/s. Both read and write performance pick up at deeper queue depths, however.

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