Transcend SSD220S 480GB SSD review

1. Introduction2. Transcend SSD220S 480GB3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark5. ATTO Disk Benchmark6. AS SSD7. IOMETER8. Real Life File Testing9. Closing Thoughts10. View All Pages

The front of the Transcend SSD220S 480GB box has an image of the drive, its capacity and a list of three of the drives features.

The rear of the box has a sticker with the drives product number, capacity and NAND type. There's a list of the drive's specifications and performance and a checklist of what's in the box. The remaining text is a multilingual marketing list of some of the drives other features.

There's not much in the box beside the drive; a warranty card, a quick installation guide, four fixing screws and some very small but useful catalogues of other Transcend products.

 

Transcend's SSD220S is built on a standard 7mm, 2.5in format using a good quality metal enclosure. To get to the drives internals its just a matter of undoing the four tiny screws on the sides of the drive, two of which are hidden under a pair of void warranty warning stickers.

The drive is built on a compact PCB that only fills about three-quarters of the enclosure. One side of the board is home to four Micron 16nm 64GB TLC NAND packages carrying the FBGA code of NW784, which gives the part number of MT29F512G08EMCBBJ5-6:B when put into Micron's FBGA decoder.

 

On the other side of the PCB sit the controller, four more Micron 16nm 64GB NAND packages giving the drive a raw capacity of 512GB, and a cache IC. The controller is a Silicon Motion SM2256KAB. The SM2256 is a 4-channel IC using a 32-bit RISC CPU supporting 2D/3D MLC and TLC NAND as well as AES 256, TCG and Opal encryption for added security and it also supports the DevSleep ultra-low power state.

The controller also has proprietary NANDXtend error-correcting and data protection technology built in, which along with LDPC (low-density parity check) and RAID Data Recovery technologies help prolong the TLC NAND's endurance.

The drive uses a Samsung DDR3L-1600 (K4B4G1646D-BYK0) chip for caching duties.

      

Transcend have an SSD management utility called SSD Scope which can be downloaded from the companies website. SSD Scope has four main sections; Status which provides information about the drive, how much capacity is being used and a wear indicator to show how much life the drive has left.

Next up is the Tool section which holds a performance benchmark, a disk scanner (either quick or full scans) and the secure erase function.

The utility also has a disc cloning tool to enable you to either clone just the OS partition or the extended disc. Finally, there is a firmware update tool which checks the drives firmware and enables you to download any updates but you will have to manually update the firmware yourself via a bootable USB drive.

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