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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hojnikb - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
geizhals.at also finds 32GB version for 32€. Although i dont think many people will buy this.Maltz - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
"The StaticDataRefresh technology monitors the error rates and when a preset threshold value is reached, the data will be rewritten to restore the correct cell charge level. I suspect all SSDs do this because it's vital to ensure the health of old data, but it's the first time I've seen it mentioned in a data sheet."I've also believed this for some time. This is a little off-topic, but doesn't this mean that TRIM is more important to drive longevity than is widely believed? Sure, garbage collection and over provisioning can usually maintain a drives' performance levels, but if the drive is re-copying around unused blocks, then this seems like a problem. (I'm looking at you, Apple!)
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
Technically yes, because the drive would be rewriting invalid (i.e. deleted) data as well. However, even without TRIM the drive will know what pages are invalid once the OS writes to the same LBAs again. The invalid pages will then be deleted sometime during garbage collection, which will return the drive to "TRIMed" state (i.e. no invalid data).It's basically the same with TRIM too because the drive doesn't necessarily erase the data immediately (i.e. data will initially be written to OP space). TRIM merely gives the drive a heads up and the data can be deleted when appropriate, whereas non-TRIM system will give the heads up when there' already new data coming in.
Gc - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
| p7: Drive Power Consumption - Random Write| ...
| Transcend SSD370 128GB - 1.90
| ...
| Transcend SSD370 512GB - 2.73
| ...
| Transcend SSD370 256GB - 3.12
Anyone have an explanation for how the middle 256GB size used the most power in this test?
(or was there a typo?)
IlikeSSD - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
with new OCZ prices I'd rather go for Arc... http://www.kitguru.net/components/ssd-drives/leo-w...velanapontinha - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
I've been waiting for this review for months. These drives were being showcased inside a low end server at Computex. I bought for 512GB drives and put them inside a HP server, connected in RAID 5 to a P410i controller.After a few months I started experiencing one drive failing every week. It all went downhill, as the failures started ocurring almost every day.
I removed those drives and they are now working fine inside laptops.
Transcend support told me they could not provide any support, as these drives were not tested in server environments.
Although these are working fine and fast in laptops, I was a bit disappointed that they show it running in servers at Computex and then fail to support that same scenario in the real world.
velanapontinha - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
Please read "I bought *four 512GB drives".Also, I'd like to add that when placed in laptops, the drives reported 100% health as per Transcend's app.
editorsorgtfo - Thursday, January 29, 2015 - link
"the SSD370 is also listed at even lower prices on Amazon Prime right now"What about regular Amazon? I don't have a Prime account.
cbjwthwm - Saturday, January 31, 2015 - link
What firmware was used on the Plextor M6S during testing, or are those old historical results provided for comparison testing? Newer Plextor firmwares (released over the last 6 months) are supposed to have addressed their service time issues, and it would be interesting to see Crucial / Micron's M550 and M600 with their recent (early Jan 2015) firmwares that hopefully address the same issues.Gizbeat - Monday, March 9, 2015 - link
Thanks for the extensive review. I recently purchased the Kingmax 256GB SME35 which has the same controller and memory. So far the drive has been excellent.