Transcend SSD370 256GB

It's been ten years since last testing any Transcend products, back in the days of DDR2 memory and 1GB flash drives. However, that changed when recently picking up a Transcend SSD370 256GB solid-state drive.

In quickly needing another solid-state drive for another system to be deployed in the LinuxBenchmarking.com test farm, I ended up buying the Transcend SSD370. I haven't tested a Transcend SSD in the past, but the 256GB model was on sale for about $100 USD. For those that may also be tempted by the low-cost Transcend solid-state drives, I ran a few comparison benchmarks. This isn't a formal Linux SSD review but just a quick overview sharing my brief experiences with this 256GB SSD being used on Ubuntu and Fedora.

The Transcend TS256GSSD370 shipped with a 3.5-inch mounting bracket for those wishing to install the drive in a conventional HDD drive bay. Aside from that, there was a quick installation guide, warranty guide, and promotional material for Transcend's array of products. At the time of writing there's some Internet retailers listing the TS256GSSD370 for around $100 USD while others list it at around $120.

The Transcend SSD370 256GB SSD uses 20nm MLC memory from Micron and the drive is 7mm thick. This Serial ATA 3.0 drive is rated for reads up to 570MB/s and writes up to 470MB/s.

For this quick testing roundabout the Transcend SSD370 was compared to an OCZ Vertex 3 240GB, OCZ Solid 2 64GB, and Intel SSDSCBW12 120GB as just some other solid-state drives laying around. All drives were freshly formatted to an EXT4 file-system and the host where the benchmarking took place was loaded with an Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 development snapshot running the Linux 3.18 kernel. All of the stock mount options and settings were used during testing from this Ubuntu Linux system. The disk tests were carried out using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.