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
Final Words
From the performance perspective, the SSD370 is a very competitive value drive. It doesn't top the charts, but it provides a very good balance of consistency and peak performance. In most workloads, particularly our real-world testing, the SSD370 performs better than the MX100 and Ultra II, which have been my go-to value drives. Under very intensive workloads, the ARC 100 is slightly faster thanks to its great consistency, but most people who are looking for value drives won't have such harsh usage anyway.
The lack of DIPM support and the high slumber power consumption is a bit disappointing, though. Given how similar modern SSDs are in terms of performance, the power consumption really matters because additional battery life is easier to notice and more concrete than a few percent increase in performance. Obviously that doesn't apply to desktop users, but the majority of PCs are laptops now, so it just seems illogical to disable DIPM. Hopefully that's something Transcend can enable through a firmware update.
| NewEgg Price Comparison (1/23/2015) | ||||
| 120/128GB | 240/250/256GB | 480/500/512GB | 960GB/1TB | |
| Transcend SSD370 | $73 | $111 | $190 | $404 |
| Transcend SSD340 | $74 | $105 | - | - |
| Samsung SSD 850 EVO | $86 | $140 | $235 | $476 |
| Samsung SSD 850 Pro | $118 | $170 | $367 | $630 |
| SanDisk Extreme Pro | - | $150 | $260 | $508 |
| SanDisk Ultra II | $70 | $110 | $215 | $405 |
| Crucial MX100 | $70 | $109 | $214 | - |
| Plextor M6S | $76 | $130 | $270 | - |
| Intel SSD 730 | - | $160 | $318 | - |
| Intel SSD 530 | $80 | $128 | $240 | - |
| OCZ ARC 100 | $70 | $99 | $190 | - |
The pricing of the SSD370 is extremely competitive. It's practically undercutting the MX100 and Ultra II, which makes it one of the cheapest value drives on the market, and the SSD370 is also listed at even lower prices on Amazon Prime right now. Only the ARC 100 is cheaper, but on the other hand it also lacks support for low power states and doesn't come in 1TB capacity either.
I don't hand out the "Recommended by AnandTech" award very often, but I think it's justified in this case. It's not an overstatement to say that the SSD370 is overall the highest performing value drive and on top of that the pricing is very alluring. I would still, however, recommend the MX100 and Ultra II for users that are concerned about battery life because of SSD370's high idle power consumption. If Transcend SSD370 was able to fix that through a firmware update, it would be safe to say that the SSD370 would be the best value SSD on the market.
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danwat1234 - Saturday, January 21, 2017 - link
Might not have been the flash degration, perhaps some other failure. A couple hundred TB before real failure probably. At least 100 I would say. Google this thread "SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm" - has extreme testing to failure. But yeah, your SSDs were probably sub 25nm.nathanddrews - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
Has AT ever done anything beyond testing TRIM and provisioning? Are you talking about prolonged write endurance? I think the manufacturer states that. Or are you thinking of this?http://techreport.com/review/27062/the-ssd-enduran...
Solid State Brain - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
The quoted numbers are what one would normally expect from honest SSD manufacturers who take into account actual 2x nm MLC NAND endurance with random workloads, based on a 3000 P/E cycles threshold. It's really nice that Transcend doesn't just settle with "40 GB/day" or "80 GB/day" or similar figures just because most consumers won't ever write that much daily.Dr0id - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
Do you know plan on reviewing the Muskin Enhanced Reactor series? The 1 TB model seems to be the least expensive model on Newegg for that capacity.Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
That's the next drive in the queue, so check back next week :)hojnikb - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
Give some love to the newfly released BX100 (based on the same controller). Looks like a nice budget offering from Crucial that happens to have very high random io for that controller.Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
I don't have samples yet.romrunning - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
In most of the tests, the Crucial MX100 beats the Transcend SSD370 at the same capacity. The Crucial drives are also cheaper by a few bucks. If that's the case, then why is it said that the Transcend drives are undercutting their competitors? Also, how can you draw the conclusion that the Transcend is the best value drive - better than the MX100?hojnikb - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
Because it kills every crucial offering in mixed workload (destroyer).Sequential speeds mean very little with ssds.
Don Tonino - Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - link
How do mixed workload correlate with the random write/read results? I've seen the same behaviour in another reviews, where the aggregate results of the SSD370 are shown to be much better than the MX100, notwithstanding both sequential and random results being much better on the latter.As I'm debating which SSD to buy to use as storage for my Steam library, I'd be interested in better understanding how to tell which one of the two is better suited.