Works great in Apple MacBook
I recently installed this in a 13" MacBook and it works splendidly!
All I had to do was remove the old HD and put this one in its place and reinstall the system, worked flawlessly and it is much snappier with the SSD for sure.
33 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
Not to be used as an XP boot disk, still just too slow, but promising performance from LINUX. / Greater battery life no matter w
Not to be used as an XP boot disk, still just too slow, but promising performance from LINUX. / Greater battery life no matter what operating system you use.
NOTE: The following information is based on our experiences with the smaller 8GB version, we feel qualified to publish this review here as well BECAUSE EVEN BY TRANSCENDS OWN ADMISSION AND SPEC's, this...
This review is from: Transcend 128 GB SATA-2 2.5-inch Solid State Drive (Electronics)
I recently installed this in a 13" MacBook and it works splendidly!
All I had to do was remove the old HD and put this one in its place and reinstall the system, worked flawlessly and it is much snappier with the SSD for sure.
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Not to be used as an XP boot disk, still just too slow, but promising performance from LINUX. / Greater battery life no matter what operating system you use.
NOTE: The following information is based on our experiences with the smaller 8GB version, we feel qualified to publish this review here as well BECAUSE EVEN BY TRANSCENDS OWN ADMISSION AND SPEC's, this 32GB disk is slower than the less expensive 8GB model we tested. Transcend should stop advertising this SSD as "an ideal replacement for your current hard drive" because this SSD isn't made for the constant disk activity of a Windows operating system. Read on for more details.
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Quick notes about relative performance:
-Transcend 2.5 SATA Flash SSD = 30/28 Megabytes per second transfer rate for read/ writes.
-Lexar UDMA 300x Compact Flash card with an Addonics SATA/CF adapter = 45 Megabytes per second transfer rate.
-Conventional SATA hard drive at 5,500 RPM similar to the one you are thinking about replacing with this Transcend SSD..... 150 MEGABYTES PER SECOND TRANSFER RATE !!
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Like many others, I bought this drive in an attempt to economically install XP on a flash disk and gain performance.
The data transfer rate of this SSD is disappointing for XP and other versions of Windows because Windows is always reading and writing to the hard drive in the background and more so when you're driving the mouse and keyboard to use your computer. Despite all of the optimizations such as disabling XP prefetching and disabling all but only essential services, this disk was still slow when driving the GUI.
This SSD data transfer rate is 30 and 28 MBs for read and write respectively.
But let me quantify what that means instead of just anecdotally describing it, most SATA notebook drives today operate with a 150 MBS transfer rate,, that is 150 MEGABYTES per SECOND transfer rate. For those accustomed to using CF card speeds, one revolution in CF is 150 KBs, or 150 Kilobytes per second (this is also the same measurement used for CD drives and was borrowed by the CF industry). So, the current UDMA offering from Lexar running at 300x means 300 * 150 KBs or 45 MBs // 45 Megabytes per second.
This SSD does have an advantage of low voltage consumption, we got 50% greater battery life when using the SSD in lieu of the the 7200 RPM SATA hard drive. But you get what you pay for, low performance seems complimentary to low performance.
What all this means is it took us four hours to install XP from a CD-ROM to this SSD, it typically takes us no more than two hours max to install XP with SP2 on the same system and a conventional SATA disk. The SSD does boot faster, it seems the SSD and our Lexar UDMA work faster than a conventional drive when we are in DOS based applications and during the boot cycle when GUI usage is at a minimum.
It is when we started using the XP GUI shell for things like reading email and browsing the web did the disk really suffer, XP appears to hang then all activity bursts onto the screen such as opening or closing windows or opening email messages.
This made us wonder if it was just the intensive background processes of Windows that was hurting our performance, so we used Knoppix 5.5 and installed the build onto the SSD after formatting off XPSP2 and NTFS and the performance was impressive. The SSD booted at least 5 seconds faster than Knoppix installed on a 7,200 RPM SATA drive and performed with instant response when using the VTT or XServer running KDE. Power consumption was also impressive, we gained 50% greater uptime versus the 7,200 and even 5,500 RPM SATA disks.
Our 300x Lexar performed even better but we'll describe those results on the Lexar product page.
Just to be clear, anyone who is thinking about booting XP off of a USB stick will face failure unless you instead use Embedded XP and a minimum of ServicePack 2, this is because other versions of XP won't load the USB driver until after the kernel, thus you'll never load the kernel from a USB disk because of this catch 22.
If you'd like to learn more about data and bus transfer rates, you can use Wikipedia's site and search for "List of Device Bandwidth" for a fairly comprehensive list of performance for everything from analog modems to Frame Relay and Fiber Optic national networks.
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I got the unit fast and put it into an external USB case. The drive does not come "ready to use" as it must be initialized in "Disk Management" and then allocated to NTSF format and maybe even mapped.
Once I figured all that out, the drive is quick - reliable and of course, silent.
It consumes so little power that the "Y" cable USB with the enclosure is not needed, but also, the LED on the enclosure (I bought separately) does NOT come on.
So you get a plain SSD which is fast and silent and energy smart. Which works great but requires some formatting and disk management before you can use it.
I like it, and I was surprised at the very affordable price considering that drives only two times larger, are ten times more expensive.
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I'm not sure why the other reviewers were having such bad luck with this. Perhaps they just don't understand how solid state disks work and what they are good for? I think this drive is very fast and you can't beat the price. We have a couple of them running some Linux and FreeBSD servers and they perform wonderfully.
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The SSD has been great so far. The battery life in my netbook (Asus Eee PC 1000HA) has gone up by about 30% after I put this drive in. Also the bottom of the netbook used to get a bit warm, and now it stays nice and cool since there is no spinning motor there. I highly recommend this product.
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This review is from: Transcend 128 GB SATA-2 2.5-inch Solid State Drive (Electronics)
I had 2X250 Raid0 Rotating HDD 5400 RPM SATA 150 . I replaced same with 2x128GB SSata 150 Transcend. I had the DVD's of my softwares. i backed up my data. and reinstalled applications after replacing the Rotating HDD with SSD. Windows (Vista Ultimate 64 Bits) installed in about 7 mins. and Visual Studio took much longer( but i was installed , with Rotating-HDD it failed). the difference in preformance was very high in application launch (almost immediate for office and visual studio) also , the Excel (office 2007) is real fast compared with the Rotating type HDD and made more calculations before it ran out of memory. However, in windows launch, i did not notice much difference . Performance boost is worth the effort. I did not have enough history to see the performance with time. The heating was not tested as i use a gaming note-book with is high heat emitting one. Computer Brain are fast and prices are the best for this item (by the time i bought it).
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As a boot disk in Windows XP, it was constantly hanging in IO for 5-10 seconds every 3-4 minutes, in exactly the same software configuration in which a regular SATA HDD works very well.
I'm simply writing off this piece of junk as a loss and throwing it straight into the trash can. (No, I will NOT try to resell it and lure someone else into wasting time and money with it.)
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