The Transcend SSD360S is a fast yet affordable Solid State Drive (SSD). It has come in as a great news for SSD lovers as they now a have a great option to look forward to and that too at a very competitive price. The company gave a glimpse of the device at Computex last year and now it is available in Retail. The retail package, in addition to the SSD itself, comes with a 3.5” desktop adaptor. The SSD is termed as one of the greatest to come out yet at its price and let us now take a deep look into how it stands up to all the praises that it has received so far.
Transcend SSD360S Review
Design and Built
The most interesting thing about this device is its custom Transcend firmware, which is accompanied by a relabelled Silicon Motion SM2246EN controller, which is called by Transcend as TS6500. In the NAND department, Transcend has used Micron’s 128Gbit 20nm MLC NAND.
This is very common in drives which are more value-oriented. This is 2.5 inch internal drive and it comes in a 7mm thickness, slightly thinner than the 9.5mm of a true standard laptop hard drive. The whole setup is housed inside an aluminium casing which is light and sturdy. A plastic version, which is completely the same but for its plastic cover, is also available.
Setup & Cloning your OS
This is the highlight of the product. Its damn easy to setup. You just need to know a little about your machine’s hardware before its setup.
Typically, you can setup your SSD in your machine in two ways:
- Replace your current HDD with SSD. For this, you need to open your laptop, take out HDD and then replace it with this SSD. You don’t need to afraid, it’s not difficult at all. You may like to watch youtube videos or read User-Manual of your Laptop or PC to assist you in doing this.
- Use a SSD caddy which you can buy online from Ebay. Before buying, you need to take care of the fact that SSD caddy is available in two sizes, 9.5mm and 12.7mm respectively. You need to choose accordingly, depending on your Laptop’s optical drive size. Check youtube videos to help you in this. Once the SSD caddy is with you, setup your SSD in SSD caddy and then replace your Optical drive with SSD caddy and you are good to go. In this way, you can use both HDD and SSD together in your machine.
Once you are done with the Setup of your SSD in your machine, you are done with the hardware part. Now let’s get to the software part.
To use SSD as your boot up disk, you need to clone your existing OS to the SSD. To make the job easier for you, you can download the official software from Transcend – SSD Scope . It’s very easy to clone your OS using SSD Scope, after downloading and installing the software, open it and click SYSTEM CLONE, after that select the options according to your requirements and click Start, check below image:
Performance
Performance wise, this device scores very close in tests to the other top drive’s available in the market. It supports data encryption and has great endurance capabilities. At the cheap price at which it’s available, its performance is a huge surprise. It has a sustained write and read speed of 311MBps and 390MBps, respectively, which exceeds most of the high end devices out there.
While reading and writing at the same time, this device gives an average speed of 151 MB/s, which is quite impressive to say the least. The device has a storage bandwidth of more than 210MB/s and it application performance too is satisfying as it goes on to improve the computer’s performance. So, if you upgrade your computer from a standard hard drive to the SSD360S, then you will surely come across a huge difference as it gives a huge storage space besides increasing the overall performance.
Speed comparison between SSD partition (Left) and Normal HDD partition (Right):
Variants
The device comes in 6 variants. The highest variant of the device is the 1TB version, which comes at a price of Australian $470. Besides this, the other variants of the device includes the 512 GB variant, the 256GB variant, the 128GB variant, the 64GB variant and the smallest one being the 32GB variant. Though there have been rumours in the markets that the 64GB and the 32GB variants might just be the OEM’s as no device these days comes with less than 126GB capacity. But Transcend have confirmed that they have released the official low capacity variants as well to suit the needs of its customers.
Other Features
The device comes with an impressive set of features which include a garbage collection mechanism and a recycling system which gives the device some great endurance and durability capability. The endurance rating keeps on increasing with the capacity of its variants meaning the more the capacity of the device, the more will be its durability. It means that on writing 20GB per day, it would take almost 20 years for the device to wear out. The device also boosts the computer speed and is better than its competitive drives on various other fronts as well.
Highlights
- SSD360 has aluminum case, which is strong and good looking.
- The installation is very easy, which is a highlight of this product. You can install it in your machine easily with a SSD caddy or replace existing HDD with it very easily.
- Incredibly Fast. You will enjoy Lag Free experience after setting it up as the boot up disk.
Cons
The biggest con of this device is that it offers only a three year warranty. Most other high end drives available in the market gives a warranty of atleast 5 to 10 years and three years when compared to those is a much shorter period.
Conclusion
So we can conclude that this device is one of the best available in the market at its price as it even competes with some of the other expensive and high end drives. It is durable, light and sturdy and if a three year warranty doesn’t bother you, then this is a product you must definitely go for, to upgrade your computer.