Transcend Solid State Drive

Transcend rolls out a 2.5-inch, 192 GB solid state drive that offers much better performance compared to conventional hard drives, and lower power consumption, but at a steep price

Saturday, July 04, 2009

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The two key parameters that go in favor of Solid State Drives (SSDs) when compared to conventional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) are that they offer better read/write speeds and high reliability. Having said so, many notebook users were not keen on switching to SSDs for they didn't offer large storage capacities. And we know any standard 2.5” notebook HDD offers upto 500 GB of data storage. Now Transcend has launched a 2.5” SSD which offers a respectable 192GB storage capacity and has SATA-II interface which makes it compatible for notebooks. Given the capacity, it can lure notebook users to switch from standard HDD to a SSD to get better performance and reliability.

This Transcend 192 GB SSD is made of NAND flash memory, which has no moving parts. Due to this , it offers high reliability over standard HDDs as it won't be susceptible to mechanical failures arising from vibration or shock. HDD on the other hand may crash or its magnetic disk can get damaged from shocks as the writing heads can scratch the disk's magnetic surface. The SSD also has a built-in feature of ECC (Error Correction Code), which ensures accurate data transfers. The drive has a Mean Time Between Failure (MBTF) rate of 1 million hours and can resist shocks of upto 1500G, which shows the reliability of the drive. For a notebook, power drawn by a hard drive affects the battery life. A standard notebook HDD draws between 5-7 Watts during write operation while Transcend SSD draws just 2.9 Watts. This difference can result in increased battery life.

Performance
The main benefit of using a SSD is that they offer high data transfer rates and negligible latency (access time). Therefore a computer equipped with SSD will boot up faster and the system's responsiveness will have noticeable improvement. We tested this drive on Intel Core 2 Duo based machine with 1GB RAM. SSD is meant to perform better than HDD, and to show the performance gap we compared this SSD's performance with a standard 5400 rpm notebook hard drive. We ran the HD Tune benchmark to evaluate performance, and it gave astounding average transfer rate of 132.3 MB/sec with an access time of 0.2 ms, while the HDD had clocked average transfer rate of 64.4 MB/sec with 18.1 ms of access time. We ran the Business Disk and High-end Disk Winmark tests of the WinBench99 suite, which are used to check a drive's throughput for business productivity and high-end applications. Transcend SSD scored 30.3 MB/sec and 57.4 MB/sec respectively which is much greater to the scores of the HDD.

Bottomline: The SSD with its low power profile is ideal for notebooks as it will make them more energy efficient, while delivering better performance, but then very few would be able to afford it.

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