Last year, gg edited the beginning of an era of switching to SSDs with a sense of deep satisfaction. They went through the stages of childhood diseases and became more reliable, retaining all their advantages over traditional hard drives, due to the lack of mechanical components: lack of noise in the work, low power consumption and high performance. The next logical step in the development of SSD was the natural appearance of a new subclass of devices: external SSD drives in the 2.5-inch form factor. A year ago, we wrote about the capabilities of the Samsung T5 SSD-drive, which already cost some reasonable money. Another sign of a growing market segment has been the emergence of even cheaper counterparts. The external SSD Transcend ED220C costs almost half the price of the Samsung T5, unwittingly causing a desire to find out and check the “dirty trick” of such a drive, whose price may be even lower than that of the same USB flash drive. Let’s figure it out.
What is interesting Transcend ESD220C
Transcend ESD220C is an external solid-state drive (SSD), produced in the 2.5 “form factor in three versions: with 120, 240 and 480 gigabytes of internal memory. For buyers, it is interesting for its modest size (slightly larger and slightly thinner matchbox), high speed read / write (the manufacturer claims 400 megabytes per second for writing and up to 410 megabytes per second for reading.) The price issue is also important – due to which Transcend manages to make its SSD cheaper than its competitors and bring their price closer to USB flash drives similar capacity (and, we note, more low data rate).
For those who want to know more
Now there are already four types of flash memory: SLC, MLC, TLC and the newest QLC. If you do not go into the technical features and do not delve into the principles of operation of memory cells in the SSD and features of the used transistors with a floating gate, they differ in price, durability and speed. The most expensive memory is SLC, followed by MLC, TLC and QLC, in which the number of data bits in the transistor increases – 1, 2, 3 or 4. In a low price, in fact, not everything is so bad – all technologies go the way of reducing the cost of technological processes. No exception and NAND memory. By the way, despite the budget class, the best representatives of the TLC-memory are closely approaching the speed of operation and durability of the MLC-memory (and this is what awaits new QLC in time). Transcend uses the technology of so-called SLC-caching, which allows a part of TLC memory cells to be used as SLC (that is, storing 1 bit of data in the transistor, and not 3 – this is what distinguishes SLC from TLC). Thanks to this caching in general, the TLC drive shows better results in both data transfer speed and endurance. Such is the technological trick to significantly reduce the disadvantages of using cheaper memory.
What is in the box
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The Transcend ESD220C storage box contains a USB cable with a USB-C connector, a user manual, a couple of booklets with catalogs of other Transcend devices, and a warranty card (by the way, the warranty on this drive is 3 years).
Neighbors in the lineup
Transcend ESD220C is the youngest series of Transcend external SSDs, the company still had the old ESD400 series of drives (using the more expensive MLC memory) and the completely newer ESD200 (we have a quick overview) of even more recent ESD250C includes an optional USB-C cable – USB-C for connecting to a smartphone. It should be added that they have a different set of memory capacity (only the ESD220C has a version with 120 GB, the new SSD will probably no longer have it). By the way, the old ESD200 and ESD400 had a more familiar memory classification – 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB. ESD220C and ESD250C have lower drive capacities due to the use of SLC caching.
How quickly works Transcend ESD220C
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The most important thing that we were interested in when working with this drive is, of course, the results of measuring the speed of work. DiskSpeedTest showed 342 megabytes per second for write operations (which is less than those stated by the manufacturer), and 420 megabytes per second when reading (which is even higher than those stated). That is, the speed of the Transcend drive lost 17% in the write speed of the same Samsung T5, but in reading speed it even went around a bit (420 MB / s against 417). Simply put, at a much lower price, the consumer gets the same technical characteristics, although the question remains about the lifespan of the drive, whose theoretical resource should be lower. On the other hand, how long do you have an external drive? I have doubts that his physical death will come earlier moral. Although the buyer should remember this, especially if you plan to make daily backups.
There is another Transcend utility called SSD Scope for checking the SSD resource. It is only for Windows and allows you to diagnose the drive, update its firmware, track the level of wear and, if necessary, clone the drive data. It is worth remembering that the 3-year warranty does not apply to drives whose wear rate is 100% (the status indicator in the SSD Scope is 0%).
What else can Transcend ESD220C
With the help of the already mentioned proprietary utility Transcend Elite (it is under Windows and OS X), you can organize archiving of the selected folder (s) on the disk on a schedule or by pressing a button on the drive body. You can also encrypt any file or folder (the main thing is not to forget the password – in which case the probability of data recovery tends to zero). A file with an encrypted archive gets the extension .enc and takes up as much disk space. After the end of the encryption procedure, the source file or folder remains in place.
Another Transcend ESD220C supports an OTG connection to a smartphone, but there was a suitable cable on hand to check (by the way, there is such a cable in the Samsung T5 bundle). However, I don’t think that something needs to be really checked there – technologically this is not rocket science, and everything should work. Transcend also says that the drive supports UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol), which should increase the speed of work on devices with its support even more (up to 20%), but somehow it did not work out with SCSI in my system, so I also check it The statement in practice was not successful, but maybe this knowledge will be useful to someone.
Competitive environment
In fact, Transcend ESD220C has very few competitors in our market. On the one hand, they certainly are. On the other hand, the price factor does its job and there is no one to compete in particular. The main ideological competitor, perhaps, is the already repeatedly mentioned Samsung T5, which takes brand knowledge and developed distribution. But the Transcend ESD220C really costs one and a half to two times cheaper, actually threatening the market for USB flash drives with a capacity of 128-256-512 gigabytes. For example, the Rosette sells the cheapest flash drive with 256 GB of memory for 1,479 hryvnia. And for this money, the buyer gets fundamentally different data transfer rates (20 MB / s for writing instead of 400, and 100 MB / s for reading instead of 420).
The bottom line
Despite the skepticism inherent in the gg edition, the external SSD drive Transcend ESD220C showed no dirty tricks at work, and is not just the cheapest SSD drive on the market. It is fully consistent with the manufacturer’s specifications, demonstrating the speed of reading and writing at 400 megabytes per second, in no way inferior in this to its more expensive competitors. And today it is a very real alternative to high-capacity USB flash drives that are familiar to us, surpassing them, if not in price (although some in price too), then in data transfer speed. An additional bonus to the purchase of such a drive will be the possibility of archiving and encrypting data, which, however, should not be carried away to the degree of fanaticism, remembering that frequent rewriting cycles affect the resource (and lifetime) of the device.