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  • hojnikb - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    Could it be possible to flash newer refrence firmware to it ?

    I know this have been done in the past, because i've flashed my Crucial V4 with newer firmware that crucial offered. I wonder if its the same with Jmicron
  • solnyshok - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    Whenever I read about slow ssd, I wonder if "the one" that I need is going to happen. If manufacturers read this - here is the niche for HTPC. I need a silent movie/torrent storage. 1TB at $200-250 would be a good start. Performance/power saving aren't that important, as long as it can sustatin 130MB/s sequential read/write (bottleneck of home gigabit network) and 10,000+ iops (to avoid jerkiness of video playback during concurrent torrent seeding)
  • ddriver - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    Most HDDs do 130 MB already. You can avoid "jerkiness" by tweaking buffering/caching for playback and torrents respectively.
  • leexgx - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    can you fix the Crucial MX100 OP results and lower the IOPS to to 30k

    as the Crucial MX100 is doing some very odd results on the 25% OP 32QD 4K Write (the last one seems an error doing 60k IOPS as its way past 50K on that last test) 412GB is making the charts go to 50k when most do not pass 25k
  • leexgx - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    4K random Write 32Q 25% OP Crucial MX100
  • solnyshok - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    Thanks for all replies, I already have SSD (256GB 840EVO+2TB 2.5"HDD) combo in my htpc. I just wanted to go totally silent. My point was that somebody needs to pack 1TB of the cheapest flash on the cheapest controller for the lowest $/GB ratio. I appreciate replies about price-o-nomics of ssd making. If it is not feasible, oh, well, I can wait couple of years.
  • MrSpadge - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    You hardly gain any cost benefit by making SSDs slow. That's why you don't see the value drives you're looking for. Sounds like a 5x00 rpm HDD together with some small to medium sized SSD for the torrents is your best solution. Assuming you don't offer your entire movie collection for torrenting, of course.
  • hojnikb - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    If you tune your torrent client right, ANY 5400rpm hdd will be just fine. I know, because i'm using an old 2.5" drive in my nas and can do multiple torrents AND streaming with ease. Its just the right tuning.
  • wolrah - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    It's not even tuning, just keeping preallocation on and keeping fragmentation down is enough.
  • solnyshok - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    Thanks, if that's the case, I just need to wait a bit (3 years?), until 1TB becomes cheap
  • 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-502
  • ddriver - 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.
  • ddriver - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    I didn't say "value".
  • Impulses - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    Besides, $30 32GB SD cards actually hit 45-60MB/s sequential.. Think I saw a $65 64GB PNY rated at 90/60 R/W, doesn't get any more value priced than that, unless you meant bargain bin SD cards...
  • hojnikb - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    Yeah, but sd card like that would be pretty unsuitable for running OS.
  • Impulses - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    Obviously, their random access speed sucks, he and I were just drawing a parallel to other cheap devices with sequential speeds that aren't very far off... Shoot, I've paid <$50 for 32-64GB USB 3.0 flash drives that hit 200MB/s sequential read/writes. I think any enthusiast knows sequential speed isn't ultimately why you buy a SSD (most of the time), but still...
  • willis936 - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    I'm pretty sure SSDs from 2009 are faster than this.
  • hojnikb - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    they are not.
  • ddriver - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    2-3 years ago was 2011-2012 :) I have a Samsung 830 128 GB which IRC came out around that time, and it is actually faster, reaching like 380 MB/sec in sequential reads.
  • ddriver - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    *writes

    Come on AT, what is this - the stone age? You know, the time people wrote on stone tablets and editing was pretty much impossible? How about an "edit" feature?
  • jabber - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    I have to say as long as they push 150MBps+ with 0.XX access times most cases are covered.

    All in the access times for day to day usage, not so much the raw MBps.
  • hojnikb - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    its not all about access times.
    You can have a bad ssd with great access times and it will still feel slow as HDD if writes are utter garbage (you can test this by installing OS on a cheap usb drive).
  • jabber - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    Hmm for most general use its reads not writes. So I doubt most normal folks would notice.
  • hojnikb - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    Again, install OS (win to go is pretty easy to setup for example) to a cheap flashdrive and come back :)

    Even though there is plenty more reads than writes in client world, its still important that random writes don't sux, because the moment OS will try to write something is the moment everything will freeze (think jmicron 602)
  • TheWrongChristian - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    Random writes suck if they block reads. That was the problem with the old jmicron controllers, a high latency write would block everything including reads.

    With good command queuing, and non-blocking writes, reads should still be low latency, and for boot and application startup, it's read latency that counts. The OS can mask write latency pretty well, to the point that you're unlikely to notice much difference on a desktop.

    On a server, you're much more likely to notice write latencies however. Think database servers writing log data, or a file server waiting for a file write before acknowledging a sync. But even there, a file server can batch write file updates from many clients (or use the sequential journal for data) and the database similarly decomposes synchronous writes to sequential log files.

    So all in all, so long as writes don't block unrelated reads, you should be fine.
  • jabber - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    As it happens I rebuilt a Sony all in one PC with just one of the exact drives in this review. Worked fine. Installed swiftly with no issues. There are benchmarks...and then there is using it in the real world and often real world is very different to those.
  • Friendly0Fire - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    The point is that according to the table in this review you can get a flat-out better SSD *for the same price*, unless you're looking for the 64gb size in which case a measly $20 will upgrade to 128gb. The value proposition just isn't there.
  • jabber - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link

    Well I got mine for £65 and the next cheapest 200+GB SSD was £85 so was worth it. Thats pounds...not dollars. Thats a $32 difference for very little difference in general usage.
  • MrFixitx - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    I am honestly not at all surprised by these results. Transcend has for years been the maker of "value" NAND based products. From camera memory cards to usb thumb drives.

    I have been burned by their compact flash cards before and would not recommend their flash based products for anything where reliability is critical.
  • velanapontinha - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    Hi, Kristian.

    Any chance of reviewing the SSD370 line anytime soon? These are dirt cheap and should prove a lot better overall than the SSD340.
  • Kristian Vättö - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    I don't have the drive yet but it's certainly on the list of SSDs to review.
  • saliti - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    What about Samsung 845 DC Pro review?
  • TonyCL6 - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link

    SSD370 should be pretty much the same as AData SP610 because of the controller and NAND configuration.
  • Per Hansson - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    The more things change the more they stay the same seems a fitting quote for this Transcend's SSD endeavors!
  • homerdog - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    Unless these drives fall way down the price ladder, there simply no reason for them to exist.
  • MadMan007 - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    Is there any budget SSD that makes sense in a world where the MX100 exists?
  • Samus - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link

    This drive (and this company) is completely irrelevant. I don't get why anybody would buy a drive outside of the Crucial/Micron/Intel/Samsung/Toshiba/Sandisk circle.

    Kingston, ADATA, Transcend, OWC, Mushkin, Corsair, and so on, make no compelling products and can't compete with Sandisk/Crucial on price because they don't make their own memory, controllers, or both.
  • hojnikb - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    Pretty much. Unless you're owning a fab it's pretty hard to compete price wise.
  • TonyCL6 - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link

    Frankly for consumer market, only Samsung and maybe Toshiba has its own SSD controllers. The rest are now mainly using Marvell solutions. Kingston, ADATA, Transcend, OWC, Mushkin, Corsair and so on help Micron(Intel) and Toshiba(Sandisk) a lot to support/ consume their NAND Flash capacity. If they all gone, I personally don't think that would do any good to end-users. You can easily tell from how Samsung sells TLC and VNAND products. The cost of NAND is way much cheaper but that never reflects on the selling price.
  • l_d_allan - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    As Butch Cassidy said, "Don't sugar-coat it" :-)
  • StrangerGuy - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    Anandtech should just probably come blunt and say "If you can't beat the MX100 in price/performance/reliability don't even THINK about selling consumer SSDs thank you very much"

    Readers that visit this site ain't fooled no matter how much ads or exposure that comes down our throats.
  • hojnikb - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    But its true. Why buy a turd, if you can speds a few extra bucks and get a proper drive.
  • KAlmquist - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link

    Back in the days of the JMF602 controller, I thought about buying one to store program files on (meaning I would be doing pretty much nothing but reads on the device and the write problem wouldn't matter). But the prices on the JMF602 drives never dropped to the point where this made sense. I eventually bought an Indilinx drive for about the same price as a J-Micron drive.

    It seems like history is repeating itself.
  • Per Hansson - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link

    You should be very glad you did not.
    I bought a 32GB JMF602B based Transcend TS32GSSD25S-M SSD in April 2008.
    This was before even the first Intel X25-M 50nm SSD was released so there was not much on the market to choose from if you wanted a "cheap" SSD
    Mind you cheap in this case was actually 1495SEK which translates to over $200!

    Performance is appalling, this is the type of SSD which you could not install Windows Vista or 7 on, because you would get "delayed write failed" errors during the installation, the SSD was simply so slow that the installation program timed out when copying the files...

    I'm using it for a Linux based firewall, IPCOP which is a 40MB ISO install, it took over 30 minutes to install!
    With a 2GB SCSI disk the same install is over in under 5 minutes, just for reference!

    Initially I gave this SSD a 2/10 score, because for my use it worked fine and I had not had any problems with it.
    But now just last week when rebooting the machine the vmlinuz boot file in /boot was corrupted.
    I can only conclude that the SSD has not refreshed the data in flash and that some bit flips has occurred, I made a HEX comparison of the file with a known good one and there where 4 errors in the file.
    Restoring the file from the original ISO made the system able to boot again, but it just goes to show what amazing crap this company makes!
    I sure would not take the bet that they have learnt anything in the last 5 years, especially so when they are probably using the crappiest flash they can find to get the price down, which they obviously have failed at when the MX100 is cheaper & performs miles better!
  • KAlmquist - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link

    That drive sounds bad. Even if one were to excuse Transcend for not refreshing the flash, the drive still should have detected the data corruption.
  • TonyCL6 - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link

    For a SSD controller to be able to make crappiest flash a working SSD requires strong R&D capability in both hardware and firmware. That is the Midas touch solution/ technology that flash memory vendors and module makers are eager to have.
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  • GraphicDesign - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link

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  • cklee16 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link

    Any idea if the updated firmware improved the performance of this drive?

    -K

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