Tuesday, December 24, 2013

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

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

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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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.

Read Best Reviews of Transcend 32GB SSD, 2.5- Inch, IDE, MLC Here

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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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:

Sequential read: 58MB/s (14,600 IO/s)

Sequential write: 20MB/s (5,000 IO/s)

4KB random read: 15MB/s (3,700 IO/s)

4KB random write: 1.1MB/s (285 IO/s)

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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