» Transcend 32GB SSD, 2.5- Inch, IDE, MLC

Transcend 32GB SSD, 2.5- Inch, IDE, MLC Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Do your research before you buy!
Comment: HELLO!!! These dives wern't meant to run XP. These particular drives run at read and write speeds well below 20 MBsec that means it's will run half as slow as a regular 2.5 inch magnetic hard drive. SSD's that slow were meant to run other types of dedicated hardware. If you want an SSD and are planning on running XP look for SSD's that were meant for that. You should be looking at specs in the 60 and 50 MBsec transfer rates in the case of IDE ULTRA DMA 5, that should give you twice the speed of a regular magnetic drive.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Huge speedup for an old system
Comment: I put this drive into an old Titanium Powerbook G4-500. This drive made more of a speedup than switching from 256MB of ram to 512.

My Xbench score more than doubled for disk. The overall feel of the system now is that of a much faster box. Maybe a superfast 7200rpm drive would have done more, but this thing is quiet!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Seriously crappy drive
Comment: Don't even think about buying this garbage drive. It went down in price from 450 to about 70 dollars. That should tell you something. Horrible write and read speads. Old drive from 2000 is faster. Totally the WRONG DRIVE to buy. Stay FAR FAR FAR away. This is a truely a P.O.S.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: If You Use Windows, Don't Buy...Linux is another story
Comment: Despite the fact that people complain about this drive being slow, the fact remains that they all are using Windows. Windows, both XP and Vista have two factors that make this drive suck when used with Windows.

These are the following:

A. Windows has a ton of background processes that always are accessing the disk, such as the indexing service and system restore.

B. Windows uses NTFS, a dilapidated old filesystem that is very inefficient, and it's journaling doesn't suffice with these drives. It's probable that even SLC (the "faster" models) will still be just as slow as a result of running Windows.

That said, I, a Linux user am extremely impressed and satisfied. I formatted this drive with the ext3 filesystem, using the noatime,notail,data=writeback options, which speed things even more. I am getting insane amounts of speed out of this little guy. Boot speed hasn't changed, as I already had it optomized as much as possible, and all the time my boot takes is 11 seconds. It would be less if the kernel did more things in parallel, but anyway, mechanical or not, throughput really doesn't have any bearing on boot speed after a while, unless you haven't hacked your init scripts to speed things up...

Anyway, apps start incredibly fast, latency is near real time, and I am very happy. If you have questions, please drop by #zen-sources on irc.freenode.net and ask me (ilikenwf) about this little fella.

I have a feeling using it with OSX would probably be pretty good too, I haven't tried using jfs with this drive, though. I will try ext4 when it is more stable, as it is even faster.

So far, I get sequential write speeds of around 126MB/sec, which is twice as fast as my mechanical drive. Random write isn't far behind. Those are far above the benchmarks given on the packaging, and I'd say this is an incredible deal. Go for it, if you use anything other than Windoze.



Benchmarks:
http://www.linuxinsight.com/how_fast_is_your_disk.html helped me figure these out. You should also see the ZDNet article on optimizing your filesystem for these disks.

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 380 MB in 3.01 seconds = 126.28 MB/sec

Seeker v2.0, 2007-01-15, http://www.linuxinsight.com/how_fast_is_your_disk.html
Benchmarking /dev/sda [28832MB], wait 30 seconds..............................
Results: 2371 seeks/second, 0.42 ms random access time

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Make sure you buy the right one! The slc, not the one they sell here, (the MLC does not work well for Operating systems)
Comment: From their web site..
"TS32GSSD25-M 32GB 32GB 2.5" Solid State Disk - MLC
TS32GSSD25-S 32GB 32GB 2.5" Solid State Disk - SLC
TS64GSSD25-M 64GB 64GB 2.5" Solid State Disk - MLC



*For OS installations, SLC version is recommended
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