[section_title title=”Conclusion”]

Conclusion

The performance of this drive was somewhat varied, through all benchmarks it showed promising read speeds which essentially means data you need that’s already stored on the drive is going to be accessible at super high speeds. The write speeds left something to be desired, and I feel given the pricing of this drive I was expecting at least double what our benchmarks showed, however as with all smaller drives the performance is usually less when compared to the larger drives in the range. Transcend happily provided us some premiliary testing data which we included in the CDM / ATTO benchmarks to give you an idea of how the larger drives perform. These drives use a new controller for us to test which obviously scales with memory size, however this is not the case with all controllers.

However I must admit that at a similar price range to the drive we tested, you can get the Sandisk SDSSDP64GB or the Patriot Blaze which in some respects out-perform the Transcend drive in benchmarks. This is not to say that it’s a bad drive and in most cases this will be that perfect drive to put life back into an older machine, but I do still have this nagging voice in the back of my head saying the 370s is quite a premium price for what is budget performance, I really feel that the drives should be in line with the pricing of for instance the Sandisk SSDSSP which is £5-£6 cheaper when comparing the various sizes.

Price, and performance aside, I do feel Transcend have some nice things that I personally seek with any SSD purchase. The included software is straightforward to understand and keeps the drive running perfectly with the use of TRIM. In the box, unlike other SSD’s you do get an included 3.5″ bracket for easy installation into larger towers with no 2.5″ support. This drive is also backed with a 3-year warranty which does bring some peace of mind when purchasing. Obviously we would have loved to have test the bigger and gruntier 1TB to get a real feel for what this product line is made of, but I can assure you moving through the different sizes they simply get faster and faster. So if your set on buying one of these drives save up as much as possible and get the biggest size you can afford. Other than that we think it’s a perfect product to compete with some of the cheaper drives and with the lowered write speed, we could really only ever consider this to be a drive to use as an operating system drive unless the larger alternative was considered .

Bottom line, whilst we reviewed the 64gb model. The 370s line does have some incredible performance if we look at the higher end of the spectrum and we can’t base our review on the 64gb model for the entire product line. Internal testing from Transcend assure us that the higher end drives basically double with write performance with each addition of memory. And once again we think the 64gb is a superb upgrade for your OS drive and has just enough space to result in super fast read speeds and boot ups.

I’ve given the 370s our Bronze Award based on the performance of this particular drive. However, I would imagine the larger scale drives would’ve received a Silver Award based on performance and compared to other products on the market.