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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danko358 - Wednesday, September 23, 2015 - link
Compared to other SSDs power consumption of SSD370 is high, as seen in review. What about comparing it to regular HDDs? As I understand, it's the same. I'm asking because I'm considering replacing regular HDD in my laptop with SSD370 256. So my battery life will remain the same? It won't be shortened?amirzz - Thursday, December 24, 2015 - link
Hithis is to inform all concerned, I don't get in what technology transcend SSD370 is made up of...
I've recently bought one of this & now after keeping a backup of my crucial data here...
one folder containing my tutorials is not respondins as needed... I don't seem to find any solutions anywhere in the net....
so plz experts in ssd help me here...
my email: neobondhu[at] gmail[dot] com
Firedrops - Monday, February 29, 2016 - link
You really should provide screenshots of actual capacities in these reviews. There can be easily ~10GB difference in capacity between brands/models even when labelled similarly, at ~240-256GB capacities.lenberg - Thursday, September 15, 2016 - link
Does anyone know how to align partitions in this ssd properly?What are the NAND Erase Block Size and NAND Page Size?
Thanks in advance.