[section_title title=”Introduction”]
Introduction
SSD’s or Solid State Drives have become the most popular upgrade for any PC system to date; if you have a SATA 3 or 6GB/s port, then your system is compatible to have one and what a difference they make! In all honesty, I can’t imagine a system being built in this day and age without at least 1 x SSD inside acting as an operating drive; my personal system has 3 x SSD’s with all but stored documents which don’t need to be accessed as frequently.
Why are they so popular though? Well it goes back to what I said above, they are the single biggest upgrade you can put into a system; the difference in response times, operating system boot times and general seek times makes mechanic HDDs (hard disk drives) look prehistoric; HDDs are the CD of the optical media world, with USB of course being SSD….enough of my analogies!
Today we take a look at a relatively new company for us at Play3r to be working with, and we’ll be getting our hands on the Transcend 370s SSD. Branded as a premium SSD, what does this sleek product have against its more well-known contenders? However this is also a first for us to review an SSD which does not use the popular lines of SSD controllers, so I’m totally unsure what to expect, you’ll find no Sandforce, no Phison, instead something new called the Transcend TS6500. Obviously this is an SSD controller made internally or rebranded from something else, so for the first part of the review I actually went off to find out a little bit more about the controller before digging into speeds.
The TS6500 is actually a rebranded Silicon Motion controller as you can find out in this review from the guys over at “TheSSDReview“. Whilst this isn’t a bad thing, we just wanted to find out as it’s rare we got an SSD that isn’t running the mainstream controllers, and it helps work out the performance before even testing the drive. As this is our first time reviewing the controller it will be interesting how it stacks up against other products on the market.
