Transcend SSD370 (128GB, 256GB & 512GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on January 27, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Transcend
- Silicon Motion
- SM2246EN
AnandTech Storage Bench 2013
Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based – we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we are testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes. I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 - The Destroyer | ||
| Workload | Description | Applications Used |
| Photo Sync/Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Lightroom 4, Dropbox |
| Gaming | Download/install games, play games | Steam, Deus Ex, Skyrim, Starcraft 2, BioShock Infinite |
| Virtualization | Run/manage VM, use general apps inside VM | VirtualBox |
| General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, copy files, encrypt/decrypt files, backup system, download content, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware |
| Video Playback | Copy and watch movies | Windows 8 |
| Application Development | Compile projects, check out code, download code samples | Visual Studio 2012 |
We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the test workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we have been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.
What surprises me is that the SSD370 does so well in the 2013 Storage Bench even though its IO consistency is leaves a lot to be desired. Again the performance is a very close match with the SP610 and overall the SSD370 is a fairly capable middle-class performer.
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Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
The MX100 and Crucial drives in general do well when they are empty, but once you have a dirty drive and mixed workload the performance suffers. Our 2015 Client SSD Suite will have a more thorough look at different performance metrics because I agree that the current suite, especially the random/sequential tests, don't show the whole picture.Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
The MX100 is only faster in synthetic Iometer tests when the drive has been secure erased. If you look at the Storage Benches, the SSD370 is faster in all except the Heavy Workload, where the MX100 is very marginally faster (not enough to really say it's faster).eddieobscurant - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
Great review, keep them coming.Just to let you know that there are some compatibility issues with amd chipset motherboards and this ssd.
http://www.amazon.de/product-reviews/B00K9HID1C/re...
Daniel Egger - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
Personally I'd rather have linked to the various English forums rather than amazon.de so most people here can understand what the problem is all about like:https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=183310.0
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2361429/p...
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php/...
I'm actually one of the couple who had problems with the SSD connected to my ASRock H87M Pro4 and after wasting almost two days trying to get it work I sent it back.
There's some speculation that the problem is caused by having 5V and 3.3V at the SATA Power connector as some PSUs and notebooks will supply it and can be resolved by using an adapter from a regular Molex connector instead. Of course I'm not able to refute or confirm that rumor.
However it does definitely not speak for Transcend for letting such a problem slip through nor does it speak for Anandtech not properly researching whether other users have problem with a product, especially when the review is done so late after the release...
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
I didn't get samples until right before I left to CES, hence the late timing. Let's just say Transcend's marketing people aren't the easiest to work with when it comes to sampling...Daniel Egger - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
Kristian, my beef is *NOT* the late review but rather that this delay should have brought you the possibility to check other peoples experiences.The two most important factors (yes, even more than speed) in SSDs are compatibility and reliability, the first one is definitely compromised and the jury is still out on the second.
With the still uninvestigated compatibility problem on the table there shouldn't have been any recommendation IMNSHO.
bfragged - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
I had slow speed and weird connection issues on all the SATA ports of my ASrock Z77 Extreme4-M while using a 512GB Trancend SSD370. Swapped it into a HP laptop and it worked fine. Very frustrating though, you would think they would test it on a wide range of systems. Looks like there are multiple motherboards that have problems with it. I saw it mentioned that it may be a compatibility issue with some SATA chipsets.Daniel Egger - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
Try using a Molex to SATA adapter rather than connecting it directly to the SATA connector of the PSU.hojnikb - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
>The SSD370 is available in capacities from 32GB to all the way to up to 1TB. I decided to leave out the 32GB and 64GB units from the specification table as I suspect these are mostly OEM-focused models because (to be honest) there isn't a significant retail market for drives smaller than 128GB anymore.Looks like these models are not OEM after all, as they can be found in lots of EU online shops
KAlmquist - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
Newegg sells the following sizes:64GB $60
128GB $80
256GB $105
512GB $202