By: Chris Ramseyer
Not long ago
Transcend released a pair of SSDs designed to take on the Team SandForce
competition. Just like others before, Transcend went with the two tier strategy,
toggle/synchronous at the top and asynchronous on the bottom. The entry-level
asynchronous model, SSD 320, easily made the biggest bang of the two in the
market. Right from the start the 320 listed as one of the lowest priced LSI
SandForce SATA 6Gbps SSDs on the market. Nothing screams look at me like an amazing price point and the SSD320
received several looks. That opened the door for us to look deeper into the
Transcend SSD line up, at the top of the pile we found a diamond.
The Transcend
SSD720 is the flagship offering from a company with a lengthy history in the SSD
market. The company managed to hit all of the check boxes with this release. Two
features that stand out as unique right now is the 7mm case design and the new
RAISE free format that gives users full access to the available flash on the
drive. To date, the RAISE free has only been tested here on an ADATA product,
the SP900. Unlike the ADATA product line up, Transcend hasn't dragged its feet
in releasing TRIM fixing firmware, a big advantage to Transcend and a major
positive for users looking to buy a RAISE free, full data capacity model that
will retain performance over time thanks to TRIM working.
The SSD720 also
uses SanDisk's 24nm Toggle flash, a positive for users looking for a low power
drive. The Transcend offering does differ from the SanDisk Extreme, at least in
the 240GB/256GB category, Transcend uses 16 lower density ICs rather than just
eight higher density NAND flash chips. This increases interleaving and gives a
small performance increase, but does increase the power draw by a small
margin.
There is an area
that Transcend doesn't get enough credit, but we would like to recognize is just
how long the company has been in the SSD market. Transcend's first SSD products
go all the way back to the PATA days when you could purchase a 2GB PATA SSD for
the price of a used Honda. 2GB of SLC flash running at 95MB/s might not seem
like much today, but back then it was groundbreaking.
Let's see how far
Transcend has come and take a look at their new flagship offering, the
SSD720.
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