22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
If You Use Windows, Don't Buy...Linux is another story
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...
32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
Very Slow
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...
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.
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My experience mirrors the others above. I installed the product in a regular PC, one I had built and was using as an HTPC, so I wanted an SSD to make the system more quiet. Very quick format, over four hours to install XP. I stuck with it anyways. Anytime I do anything once I'm in XP, it's VERY slow. It takes about 4-5 minutes for any random application to load (like JRiver Media Center, Adobe Reader, Firefox, etc). If I right click on My Computer for the purpose of pulling up the properties to get to the device manager, it'll take anywhere from 6-7 minutes to get into the device manager. If I then take another 3-5 minutes to get into the task manager and then processes, it shows my that the system idle process on the CPU usually sits in the high 90s, so there's nothing else going on in the background. I reinstalled the old fashioned HDD, and the problem went away. This product is an absolute dud, Transcend should issue a prompt recall. I was thinking about exchanging it thinking maybe I got a bad unit, but apparently, mine operates exactly like any other fully functional drive does and is not defective. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!
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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
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Formatting is really fast; installing windows xp broke of suddenly, my notebook getting extremely hot in the meantime. None of three computers found the card then, no further formatting or installing was possible.
This Transcend card is definitely an absolute flop.
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According to what I read on tech review sites, this drive uses the JMicron JMF602B controller, which supposedly have very bad random write performance (around 6 write operations per second). However, my own tests using fio on a ThinkPad X30 (circa 2003) painted a very different picture:
The 4KB random write performance is not that great compared to drives that use the Indilinx Barefoot controller (such as RunCore Pro IV), but the numbers I got in my own benchmark is 45 times better than the number (6 IO/s) reported by tech review sites. Maybe Transcend and JMicron solved the problem with JMF602B, or maybe the low random write performance problem is specific only to Windows. Who knows? All I can tell you is that this drive works great in Linux, and that is all that matters to me.
In comparison, here are the benchmark results I got for my Hitachi 5K100 5400rpm 100GB (mechanical) hard drive:
Sequential read: 37MB/s
Sequential write: 32MB/s
4KB random read: 0.46MB/s
4KB random write: 0.8MB/s
Note the drastic difference in random read performance.
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This review is from: Transcend 2.5" Solid State Disk - Solid state drive - 64 GB - internal - 2.5" - IDE/ATA (Electronics)
I put this into an older HP laptop (Pentium 4-M, 2GB RAM) replacing a 5400rpm spindle drive, and it runs like a new PC. I installed Vista to see how it would run and decided to keep it on there. Vista is running perfectly snappy in this older laptop thanks to this hard drive. The size makes it a little prohibitive, especially for people who like to download lots of "stuff", but Vista, Office 2007, IE8, Norton Internet Security, and a host of plug-ins are running perfectly fast on this 3+ year-old laptop.
Pros:
-Fast
-zero config problems
-IDE interface (I consider this a Pro because IDE SSDs are hard to come by)
Cons:
-Price/Gig, even when compared to other SSDs. I understand SSDs are more expensive than spindle drives, but IDE SSDs are even more so. Two hundred bucks for less than 64GB of useable space is a little silly, but at least I was able to breathe new life into an older and otherwise less-than-useful laptop.
Time will tell how it holds up over the months and years, but so far, I am very, very happy with this drive and I would definitely recommend it. Pretty soon, SSDs are going to become a lot more widespread and will be the upgrade of choice for breathing new life into sluggish PCs and Macs.
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From their web site..
"TS32GSSD25-M 32GB 32GB 2.5" Solid State Disk - MLC
TS32GSSD25-S 32GB 32GB 2.5" Solid State Disk - SLC
TS64GSSD25-M 64GB 64GB 2.5" Solid State Disk - MLC
*For OS installations, SLC version is recommended
"
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Before i bought it i read other peoples review, and some people said it didnt work well with windows. But at that time i was using Linux, and the Linux users said it works great, So i got it and it does!
But later i needed to start using windows again cause of some software.
I had read that the reason people had problems is cause windows uses NTFS file system which dont work well on these drives.
Well i use Windows Xp Pro, and when you goto install it by default it only gives you the option to use NTFS.
But if you have a way to format the drive to Fat32 before you boot the windows install cd, when you do, it should give you the option to use a Fat32 Formated Partition.
SO i used [...] . scrool down to "Download final stable version" and get the iso and burn it.
Boot off the cd and use the default boot options (just press enter) then when you are at a prompt type startx , Then when the graphical user interface loads, in the shell/treminal window type gparted , its simple to use.
Oh and something to think about while your partitioning the drive, If you will be using file share apps and working with files in size of around 4 gig or more like dvd's you will want to make 2 partitions, one Fat32 for windows and a NTFS for your dvd sized files.
If you feal like you need to, you can mail me at [...]
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I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on it. It took about an hour. I supposed it would have taken longer if the computer was faster than 733MHz. The installation took about the same about of time as when I installed the same OS to a 7200RPM 3.5" disk, so the bottleneck was apparently the CPU and the CDROM drive.
Regular use of the system is quick -- Booting is faster, launching applications and doing anything disk-related is faster... this is a great drive!
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