Dukutek.com - Transcend is a Taiwanese company specializing in memory and flash
storage solutions. While Transcend may not be the first company that
comes to mind about NAND flash, it has been in the industry since the
late 80's. Transcend's USB flash sticks and SD cards are actually rather
popular at least here in the northern Europe, but they aren't exactly
known for their SSDs.
Transcend's lineup consists of two SSDs: SSD320 and SSD720. Both are
(unsurprisingly) based on SandForce's SF-2281 controller, which has been
the choice of many smaller SSD OEMs. SandForce's licensing strategy is
ideal for small OEMs who lack the resources to design their own
controller or firmware, so by going with SandForce the OEM only needs to
assemble the drive (and of course market, distribute etc).
| SSD320 | SSD720 | |
| Capacities (GB) | 64, 128, 256 | 64, 128, 256, 512 |
| Form Factor | 2.5" 7mm | |
| Controller | SandForce SF-2281 | |
| NAND | Micron 25nm asynchronous MLC | SanDisk 24nm Toggle-Mode MLC |
| Sequential Read | 560MB/s | 560MB/s |
| Sequential Write | 540MB/s | 530MB/s |
| 4KB Random Read | 49K IOPS | 47K IOPS |
| 4KB Random Write | 87K IOPS | 93K IOPS |
| Warranty | 3 years | |
Transcend's lineup is fairly typical when compared to other SandForce
OEMs. There is a low-end budget model with asynchronous NAND (similar to
OCZ's Agility 3), while the high-end market is catered by a Toggle-Mode
equipped SSD720. Both models come with a 3-year warranty, which is
normal but many high-end SSDs (such as Samsung SSD 840 Pro, Intel SSD
520, Plextor M5 Pro) carry a 5-year warranty nowadays, so the 3-year
warranty in SSD720 is a bit disappointing.
RAISE (SandForce's NAND redundancy feature) is disabled on both SSDs,
which results in slightly higher capacities than we usually see with
SandForce based SSDs. SandForce has said that RAISE is not necessary for
client workloads, so disabling it makes a lot of sense and there are
other manufacturers who do it as well. For more thorough explanation on
RAISE and SandForce capacities, I recommend reading this article.
| Price Comparison (1/25/2013) | |||||
| 120/128GB | 240/256GB | 480/512GB | |||
| Transcend SSD720 | $125 | $225 | $430 | ||
| Transcend SSD320 | $110 | $200 | N/A | ||
| Corsair Neutron GTX | $135 | $225 | $470 | ||
| Corsair Neutron | $120 | $190 | N/A | ||
| Corsair Force GS | N/A | $220 | $440 | ||
| Plextor M5 Pro | $130 | $210 | $420 | ||
| Plextor M5S | $130 | N/A | N/A | ||
| Crucial m4 | $120 | $170 | $390 | ||
| Intel SSD 520 | $145 | $260 | $500 | ||
| Intel SSD 330 | $125 | $200 | N/A | ||
| Samsung SSD 840 Pro | $140 | $200 | $520 | ||
| Samsung SSD 840 | $110 | $180 | $355 | ||
| OCZ Vector | $140 | $240 | $510 | ||
| Mushkin Chronos Deluxe | $120 | $180 | N/A | ||
Pricing wise both the SSD320 and SSD720 are average. Neither of them is
cheap but on the other hand, neither of them is among the most
expensive drives. As always, take the prices in the table with a grain
of salt because pricing is highly fluctuating, the prices you see today
may be totally different tomorrow or next week.
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