Transcend 32GB SSD, 2.5- Inch, IDE, MLC

by Transcend

• Form Factor - 2.5" - Internal
• Dimensions WxDxH - 69.85 x 100.00 x 7.40 mm
• Weight - 80g
• Connector -- 44-Pin standard IDE/ATA connector (Pitch 2.0 mm)

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 4.5 x 5.6 x 1.4 inches ; 1.9 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000T9QRKE
• California residents: Click here for Proposition 65 warning.
• Item model number: TS32GSSD25-M
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 6, 2007

Product Description

Due to smaller size (fit the standard dimensions of 2.5¿ IDE Hard Disk Drives), huge capacity, high speed, and low power consumption, Solid State Disk is perfect replacement storage device for PCs, Laptops, gaming systems, and handheld devices. Features -- RoHS compliant, Fully compatible with devices and OS that support the IDE standard (44-Pin, pitch = 2.00 mm), Non-volatile Flash Memory for outstanding data retention, Built-in ECC (Error Correction Code) functionality and wear-leveling algorithm ensures highly reliable of data transfer, Supports up to PIO Mode 4 and Ultra DMA Mode 4, Lower Power Consumption, Shock resistance.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 67 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars If You Use Windows, Don't Buy...Linux is another story September 7, 2008

By Matthew Parnell

Despite the fact that people complain about this drive being slow, the fact remains that they all are using Windows. Windows, both XP and Vista have two factors that make this drive suck when used with Windows.

These are the following:

A. Windows has a ton of background processes that always are accessing the disk, such as the indexing service and system restore.

B. Windows uses NTFS, a dilapidated old filesystem that is very inefficient, and it's journaling doesn't suffice with these drives. It's probable that even SLC (the "faster" models) will still be just as slow as a result of running Windows.

That said, I, a Linux user am extremely impressed and satisfied. I formatted this drive with the ext3 filesystem, using the noatime,notail,data=writeback options, which speed things even more. I am getting insane amounts of speed out of this little guy. Boot speed hasn't changed, as I already had it optomized as much as possible, and all the time my boot takes is 11 seconds. It would be less if the kernel did more things in parallel, but anyway, mechanical or not, throughput really doesn't have any bearing on boot speed after a while, unless you haven't hacked your init scripts to speed things up...

Anyway, apps start incredibly fast, latency is near real time, and I am very happy. If you have questions, please drop by #zen-sources on irc.freenode.net and ask me (ilikenwf) about this little fella.

I have a feeling using it with OSX would probably be pretty good too, I haven't tried using jfs with this drive, though. I will try ext4 when it is more stable, as it is even faster.

So far, I get sequential write speeds of around 126MB/sec, which is twice as fast as my mechanical drive. Random write isn't far behind. Those are far above the benchmarks given on the packaging, and I'd say this is an incredible deal. Go for it, if you use anything other than Windoze.

Benchmarks:
http://www.linuxinsight.com/how_fast_is_your_disk.html helped me figure these out. You should also see the ZDNet article on optimizing your filesystem for these disks.

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 380 MB in 3.01 seconds = 126.28 MB/sec

Seeker v2.0, 2007-01-15, http://www.linuxinsight.com/how_fast_is_your_disk.html
Benchmarking /dev/sda [28832MB], wait 30 seconds..............................
Results: 2371 seeks/second, 0.42 ms random access time

31 of 36 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Slow as molasses December 21, 2007

By C. Kobayashi

My experience matches the previous reviewer's description.

Windows XP installation took about 4 hours before I just gave up.

I own a Samsung 1.8" SSD in a Toshiba Libretto U100 that is lightning fast compared to this Transcend piece of junk.

Very disappointed. I recommend staying away.

39 of 47 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Very Slow December 19, 2007

By J. Cunae

Amazon Verified Purchase

I've tried to install Windows XP on this drive twice. The drive formated instantly. First few megabytes copied very fast and then it slowed down to a crawl. I repeated the process after waiting for 4 hours with "Time Remaining" stuck at 39 min., with the same results. Then I placed the drive in an external usb enclosure to see what's going on. The formating takes a few seconds. During file transfer to the SSD drive the first 8-9MB copy really fast, then it slows down to a crawl. 18GB took at least 2 hours to copy onto this drive. I would stay away from it.