Hands-On with Transcend’s High Speed SSD

Yesterday Transcend announced their high speed portable solid state drive, the SSD18M. We were lucky enough to get one of the first units in existence — an engineering sample, specifically — and can offer our first impressions.

The best thing about the SSD18M is how light and tiny it is. Smaller than a business card  and weighing less than 50 grams, this SSD is as convenient to carry around as a flash drive. Even with the additional cord you’re still only talking a few ounces. And, of course, with flash memory you won’t need to worry about damage from shock and vibration.

One small drawback is that the drive is so light that it doesn’t feel quite like a solid piece of tech.  Perhaps if the casing was made of a light metal or another hearty but lightweight material, it wouldn’t give this impression.

The drive boasts a unique feature that’s sure to get attention: the option to connect via both USB and eSATA ports. Transcend claims that the eSATA connection will double the write speed and almost triple the read speed.  According to Transcend, the max read and write speeds for the USB connection should be 35 and 25Mbps.  For eSATA, max read/write should be 90/50 Mbps.

When we ran our File Copy Test, which copies a 4.97GB folder of mixed media (videos, photos, music, and documents), we got the following results:

It falls short of Transcend’s stated maximum speed, but how does this compare to other drives?  Of the drives we’ve tested, the average speed for “pocket” hard drives over USB connections is: 22.9 Mbps read; 17.0 Mbps write.  The average for the eSATA-connected desktop drives we’ve tested is: 36.8 Mbps read; 37.4 write.

Keeping in mind that our unit is an engineering sample, we’re not ready to give a definitive opinion based on these results.  Hopefully we’ll get a production unit in the near future; if so, we’ll run another set of tests.

The Transcend SSD18M will be available in 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB sizes. We don’t have any solid information on the price of the 32 or 64 models, but the 128GB will retail for $270.  Considering that other external SSDs with half as much memory run for $200 – $400, the SSD18M has a tempting price point for solid state enthusiasts.  If it can deliver speeds close to the maximum goal, Transcend may have a hit on its hands.