Customer Reviews

Transcend 512MB Flash Module (TS512MDOM40V-S)

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If your Atom motherboard has an IDE slot not being used by a CD/DVD on IDE then throw one of these on there for an "embeddisk", small flash disk, or just easy to manage disk.
In the embedded world these small and relatively cheap drives can make a difference when your options are SSD or USB flash or Compact Flash using USB multi reader or even vs onboard FLASH etc. This is far more expensive at a $price per Gigabyte$ but its worth it for rugged, low watt, temperature sensitive, dusty, and rugged enviornments.

Blazing speeds? not really. I tested using HDTune and it gets 3.5mb/s which is fine, perhaps something is uniquely wrong with my drive attachment (on intel using windows XP sataII to IDE swap bays) or maybe Its the custom setup on the particular motherboard. I tried ATTO Disk benchmark also and got some truely odd results
Read peaked at 1800mb/s WOW... faster than the best OCZ PCI-E SSD
Write leveled off at around 200mb/s seems like thats reasonable for SataII...?
So either one Im not sure how to test it or change the setup to allow me to test it for speed
I have lots of computers sure, but its the trouble of opening or moving things to test it on those vs plugging it to the hot swap bay.
I will do further testing of course to see but IT Will Take Time.

.3ms random seek, thats quite common for flash disks
I get .5ms on a usb flash or CF using Sata or USB multi reader

Formatted I received 479mb which is plenty for Windows CE6

The 64mb,128,256 are so much less negligible in price that the 512mb seemed worth the extra two bucks for a full out test.
however the price range of the higher ones become more comparable with larger Sata SSD.


Read the datasheets for the specifications. This seems to be normal NAND flash and it has wear levelling built into the controller. That is GREAT.
Long Life, Low power, "Lifetime Warranty"
NO WHERE does it say you will get Xmb/s nowhere, thats fine. I Dont expect performance when it does not explicitly state 10,15,30,40,60mb/s. Thats why I tested it.
BIOS boots and recognizes the drive immediately.
It has a simple dipswitch style configuration for Master/Slave
Just flip the switch and its in one of those
Does not have a pin switch for "Cable Select" or "Single Master" But it works just fine and I probally wont be trying to configure CDroms and Harddisks on the same cable to see how it works. You can get 40/80wire IDE cables that have male pins on them or use a Male-Male adapter but I wont be going to that level of testing.

You can get windows98 (120mb) , windows 2000 (170mb) and anything less on this disk easily
WindowsXP you are pressed to get below the 700mb mark unless you do a custom XPlite build to extract literally everything
You can get some good flavors of Linux on this disk without a problem just keep those update files deleted.
So dont expect a new use for your IDE slot on an aging system unless you plan to use an aging or slimmed down OS
sure you can get the 1gb or 2gb sizes to acommodate, and $price per GB$ goes down the larger you go


WHEW, having fun yet?
I see very little reviews or benchmarks on these drives
There are no reviews on amazon at all.

I will continue keeping up with these flash IDE Drives (aka embeddisk)
best way to find them - search "flash ide 40 pin" there are some other manufacturers but they are hard to find on store-sites.
also I hear there is a "Pen Sata" drive similar to this you plug directly into the Sata port
That sounds interesting also I will try to find one of those.



Transcend seems like a good company trying to sell things for industrial applications.
Their datasheets are acceptable for engineering specifications
They are also prompt to answer questions effectively if you wish to contact them.

Thanks to the seller, thanks amazon, thanks manufacturer.