Transcend SSD340 (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on August 4, 2014 5:00 AM ESTFinal Words
From a performance perspective, the SSD340 leaves a lot to be desired. It is the slowest SSD in our 2013 Storage Bench and the IO consistency is also quite horrible compared to the competition. I have to wonder why Transcend is not utilizing the newer firmware from JMicron because the reference design SSD with Intel's 128Gbit 20nm NAND is much faster than the SSD340 is. It is certainly possible that Transcend is using lower grade NAND to cut costs, which would explain the lower performance, but I find it hard to believe that the NAND alone would result in up to 35% decrease in performance.
| Amazon Price Comparison (7/31/2014) | ||||
| 64GB | 120/128GB | 240/256GB | ||
| Transcend SSD340 | $55 | $70 | $115 | |
| ADATA Premier Pro SP920 | - | $75 | $130 | |
| ADATA Premier SP610 | - | $70 | $120 | |
| SanDisk Ultra Plus | - | $70 | $110 | |
| Crucial MX100 | - | $75 | $110 | |
| Plextor M6S | - | $80 | $132 | |
| Intel SSD 530 | - | $82 | $160 | |
| OCZ Vertex 460 | - | $90 | $140 | |
| Samsung SSD 840 EVO | - | $90 | $140 | |
Ultimately it all boils down to price and that is where the SSD340 fails to set itself apart from the competition. The SSD340 is definitely one of the cheapest SSDs around but the competition can provide a much better feature set and performance at a similar price. For the price of the SSD340, you can get ADATA Premier SP610, SanDisk Ultra Plus or Crucial MX100 – all of which are better picks than the SSD340. The only advantage that the SSD340 has is the 64GB model that most manufacturers no longer offer, but I would strongly recommend spending $15-20 more to get twice the capacity and a better SSD (e.g. the MX100).
All in all, the SSD340 is a rather unimpressive drive. At $50 for 128GB and $90 for 256GB, it might be a good option for buyers that have a very tight budget, but at the current prices the SSD340 just does not make any sense. You are much better off with the Crucial MX100 or ADATA Premier SP610 at the same price.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
57 Comments
View All Comments
farhadd - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
Newegg recently had the 840 EVO 1TB on sale for $390. So hopefully you'll be seeing that $250 price point by 2016.Tetracycloide - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link
Getting a SSD just because it makes less noise is not going to be a cost effective way to reduce noise for the foreseeable future. Just throw some acoustic foam in the case and use the cheapest gig/$ HDD you can find.Strunf - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link
Just put some RAM on the HTPC and set the torrent client to use a fair amount of it and minimize disk access, SSD for HTPC or torrenting is an overkill... the only real advantage of the SSD is to boot faster anything else wont really benefit from it.Zolcos - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link
Storing all your movies on the HTPC isn't practical imo, at least once you get a sizable collection. HTPCs have high requirements for noise and physical size (great place for SSD) whereas mass storage is all about cost, density, and possibly redundancy (better for HDD). You're better off building a separate file server in another room and having your HTPC play the movies off a network share. A nice big cheap raid set of HDDs will provide enough throughput to saturate your internet upload via torrenting while also having smooth 1080p playback over the LAN.tuxRoller - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link
As others have said you don't need a big ssd to meet your reqs. On Linux you could employ bcache with a small ssd (say, 32gb), and then get a big, slow saucer for bulk.I'd imagine windows offers something similar.
Samus - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link
You should really look at an SSHD for a media center. It won't cache playback of random media files, but it the 7200RPM drives have a sustained read of 150MB/sec and write of 120MB/sec at the outer sector, and the real benefit in an HTPC comes from caching startup/system data and program files. The overall response is very snappy, even SSD like.My 2.5" 1TB and 3.5" 2TB have both been excellent. Among the only Seagate products I've been happy with lately.
TonyCL6 - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
Seems like Transcend finally provides the new firmware? http://www.transcendusa.com/Support/No-502ddriver - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link
Too slow on sequential writes, even at its fastest it is as slow as SSDs 2-3 years ago. And 37 mb/sec? What is that? SD cards are faster...MrSpadge - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link
Using the cheaper 128 GBit NAND chips means you can only use 2 of them in parallel for 32 GB capacity.hojnikb - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link
i don' think any value 32GB sd card tops 37MB/s WRITE.And random write it will destroy pretty much every sd card you can throw at it.