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

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

Customer Rating:
Summary: TRanscend 32GB SSD 2.5 Inch SATA
Comment: I got the unit fast and put it into an external USB case. The drive does not come "ready to use" as it must be initialized in "Disk Management" and then allocated to NTSF format and maybe even mapped.
Once I figured all that out, the drive is quick - reliable and of course, silent.
It consumes so little power that the "Y" cable USB with the enclosure is not needed, but also, the LED on the enclosure (I bought separately) does NOT come on.
So you get a plain SSD which is fast and silent and energy smart. Which works great but requires some formatting and disk management before you can use it.
I like it, and I was surprised at the very affordable price considering that drives only two times larger, are ten times more expensive.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Not to be used as an XP boot disk, still just too slow, but promising performance from LINUX. / Greater battery life no matter w
Comment: Not to be used as an XP boot disk, still just too slow, but promising performance from LINUX. / Greater battery life no matter what operating system you use.

NOTE: The following information is based on our experiences with the smaller 8GB version, we feel qualified to publish this review here as well BECAUSE EVEN BY TRANSCENDS OWN ADMISSION AND SPEC's, this 32GB disk is slower than the less expensive 8GB model we tested. Transcend should stop advertising this SSD as "an ideal replacement for your current hard drive" because this SSD isn't made for the constant disk activity of a Windows operating system. Read on for more details.

----------------------------------------
Quick notes about relative performance:
-Transcend 2.5 SATA Flash SSD = 30/28 Megabytes per second transfer rate for read/ writes.
-Lexar UDMA 300x Compact Flash card with an Addonics SATA/CF adapter = 45 Megabytes per second transfer rate.
-Conventional SATA hard drive at 5,500 RPM similar to the one you are thinking about replacing with this Transcend SSD..... 150 MEGABYTES PER SECOND TRANSFER RATE !!
----------------------------------------

Like many others, I bought this drive in an attempt to economically install XP on a flash disk and gain performance.

The data transfer rate of this SSD is disappointing for XP and other versions of Windows because Windows is always reading and writing to the hard drive in the background and more so when you're driving the mouse and keyboard to use your computer. Despite all of the optimizations such as disabling XP prefetching and disabling all but only essential services, this disk was still slow when driving the GUI.

This SSD data transfer rate is 30 and 28 MBs for read and write respectively.

But let me quantify what that means instead of just anecdotally describing it, most SATA notebook drives today operate with a 150 MBS transfer rate,, that is 150 MEGABYTES per SECOND transfer rate. For those accustomed to using CF card speeds, one revolution in CF is 150 KBs, or 150 Kilobytes per second (this is also the same measurement used for CD drives and was borrowed by the CF industry). So, the current UDMA offering from Lexar running at 300x means 300 * 150 KBs or 45 MBs // 45 Megabytes per second.

The Lexar UDMA 300x Compact Flash card plugged into an Addonics CF/SATA Lexar Media CF8GB-300-380 8GB Professional UDMA 300x Compact Flash Memory Card adapter (currently isn't sold on Amazon although their IDE version is) Dual Slots Cf HDD Adapter but you can buy the SATA converter on their website. The Lexar and Addonics SATA converter blew this Transcend disk away for the same money.

This SSD does have an advantage of low voltage consumption, we got 50% greater battery life when using the SSD in lieu of the the 7200 RPM SATA hard drive. But you get what you pay for, low performance seems complimentary to low performance.

What all this means is it took us four hours to install XP from a CD-ROM to this SSD, it typically takes us no more than two hours max to install XP with SP2 on the same system and a conventional SATA disk. The SSD does boot faster, it seems the SSD and our Lexar UDMA work faster than a conventional drive when we are in DOS based applications and during the boot cycle when GUI usage is at a minimum.

It is when we started using the XP GUI shell for things like reading email and browsing the web did the disk really suffer, XP appears to hang then all activity bursts onto the screen such as opening or closing windows or opening email messages.

This made us wonder if it was just the intensive background processes of Windows that was hurting our performance, so we used Knoppix 5.5 and installed the build onto the SSD after formatting off XPSP2 and NTFS and the performance was impressive. The SSD booted at least 5 seconds faster than Knoppix installed on a 7,200 RPM SATA drive and performed with instant response when using the VTT or XServer running KDE. Power consumption was also impressive, we gained 50% greater uptime versus the 7,200 and even 5,500 RPM SATA disks.

Our 300x Lexar performed even better but we'll describe those results on the Lexar product page.

Just to be clear, anyone who is thinking about booting XP off of a USB stick will face failure unless you instead use Embedded XP and a minimum of ServicePack 2, this is because other versions of XP won't load the USB driver until after the kernel, thus you'll never load the kernel from a USB disk because of this catch 22.

If you'd like to learn more about data and bus transfer rates, you can use Wikipedia's site and search for "List of Device Bandwidth" for a fairly comprehensive list of performance for everything from analog modems to Frame Relay and Fiber Optic national networks.

---