Transcend SSD320 & SSD720 (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on January 25, 2013 11:31 AM ESTFinal Words
Once again it's proven that the difference between SandForce based SSDs is extremely small. Transcend's SSD720 performs nearly identically to Corsair's Force GS and I'm willing to bet that the performance of all the other Toggle-Mode NAND based SF-2281 SSDs is also very similar. The SSD320 isn't a special case either as there are several SF-2281 SSDs with asynchronous NAND as well, such as Mushkin Chronos and OCZ Agility 3. The performance of both drives is exactly what you would expect when you look at the specifications, which isn't bad news but neither is it astonishing.
Pricing is fair but I find the SSD320 to be slightly overpriced. When you can get a Plextor M5S, Samsung SSD 840 or Intel SSD 330 for less, it's quite obvious which you will pick. If Transcend can lower the price enough to make the SSD320 cheaper than big-brand SSDs, then it's a viable option for those who are hunting for an affordable drive.
The biggest issue of smaller SandForce OEMs is to differentiate themselves from the others. There are at least half a dozen OEMs that have a lineup equivalent to Transcend. When you're selling the same product as your competitors, the only area where you can compete is price. This trend won't last forever. Races to the bottom often result in consolidation in the market.
The client SSD market currently has more manufacturers than it can feed in the long run. I'm not suggesting that Transcend will or should exit the market, but the smaller manufacturers with no unique products are the most at risk. What I would like to see is more Plextor-like manufacturers, who weren't very well known in the SSD industry but took the risk and designed their own firmwares for Marvell's controllers. In the end there aren't all that many different controller/firmware platforms, there is definitely room for a couple more.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
34 Comments
View All Comments
paul878 - Friday, January 25, 2013 - link
For a second I thought they were 320G and 720G drives.Azurael - Friday, January 25, 2013 - link
So what's the difference between a Sandisk Extreme SSD and a Transcend SSD720? How many more identical SSDs can the market support?Flying Goat - Friday, January 25, 2013 - link
If you tried to skip the drives over a lake, you'd find that one was most likely designed with aerodynamics in mind, while the other was not. Sadly, we're just never going to see the sort of truly complete feature comparison at AnandTech that covers that sort of thing. :)gammaray - Friday, January 25, 2013 - link
i dont know, but i got the SanDisk extreme 240gb home and its ultra fast and paid 160$ on sale for it :Dembzyk - Sunday, January 27, 2013 - link
9.5mm vs 7mm heightEgg - Friday, January 25, 2013 - link
The Transcend SSD720 256GB achieves a busy time of just over half that of the Samsung SSD 840 Pro 256GB, and it's missing a decimal place.This seems highly suspect.
Kristian Vättö - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
Oh, you're right, there was a typo. It should've been 362 instead of 162. Fixed! :-)iwod - Friday, January 25, 2013 - link
SSD1st Gen - SATA ; Response Time Reduction Compared to HDD
2nd Gen - SATA II; Higher Seq Read Write
3rd Gen - SATA II; Better Random IO
4th Gen - SATA III; Overall Improvement to both Seq and Random
5th Gen? I think Next Gen we need SATA Express and something similar to Intel's Consistent I/O Performance.
Tech-Curious - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
Eh, there's still a fair amount of head room on the SATA 3 interface. Wouldn't expect PCIe to become the norm for at least another two generations.Tech-Curious - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
Sorry, misread your comment, iwod. Still, even if sequential speeds remain more or less stagnant, there's a lot of room left to improve random read/write with SATA 3.