Transcend Premium SSD TS256GSSD370S: Trying A $70 256GB SATA 3.0 SSD

In routinely needing more storage devices for our dozens of automated Linux benchmarking systems powering LinuxBenchmarking.com and the rest at Phoronix Media, when recently seeing a deal on a Transcend TS256GSSD370S 256GB SATA3 SSD for $70 USD I decided to try it out.

The Transcend Premium TS256GSSD370S 256GB SSD utilizes MLC NAND flash chips and claims maximum read speeds up to 570MB/s and max writes up to 470MB/s. While the 256GB SSD is what's being tested, this series is also available in sizes ranging from 32GB to 1TB.

The Transcend TS256GSSD370S is backed by a three-year warranty. Included with a solid-state drive was a 3.5-inch mounting bracket for those that need it. While I was able to buy the 256GB SSD for $71 USD earlier this month on Amazon.com, current pricing puts it at $90 for the 256GB SSD.

It was quite interesting looking at this Transcend SSD. While I bought this drive, it's not too often I look at new Transcend products -- in the past Transcend had sent out review samples for Linux testing on Phoronix back in the days of a 1GB flash drive and DDR2 memory.

For those also interested in potentially this Transcend SSD, prior to commissioning it into a LinuxBenchmarking.com system I ran a variety of benchmarks against a few other recent Serial ATA 3.0 solid-state drives I've bought for different Linux systems. From the same Ubuntu system with the Linux 4.2 kernel, the SSDs tested were the 120GB OCZ TRION 100, 120GB Silicon Power SPCC, 240GB OCZ Vertex 3, 64GB ADATA SP600, and this 256GB Transcend TS256GSSD370S. All solid-state drives were using a freshly-formatted EXT4 file-system. All disk benchmarks were conducted via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.