Transcend 1.8in Portable Solid State Drive review

Solid-state disks have been heralded as the future of storage for a multitude of reasons: they're quicker and lighter than hard drives, far more reliable, and are less susceptible to damage due to the absence of moving parts. Their reliability and lightness makes them especially useful as external, portable devices, but we've previously only seen one external SSD, and that had a meagre 32GB capacity.

This new offering from Transcend looks like a more credible contender thanks to its 128GB capacity and alluring vital statistics. It's 80mm long and 50mm wide, weighs just 40g - far less than the average portable hard disk - and will be barely noticeable in a pocket. The black glossy styling is only interrupted by a small logo and blue light when the unit is being used, and the small disk crams in both USB and eSATA connections.

Performance was varied. Over USB we found the Transcend was understandably limited by the restricted bandwidth; most of the external drives we saw in our last Labs test were quicker in our multiple file writing tests, for instance. When the Transcend was faster, it wasn't by much, with the SSD drive proving marginally quicker when reading larger files.

The Transcend's quality shone through when using an eSATA cable, though. Writing a single 50MB file, for instance, took 1.2 seconds, and reading the same file took around half a second - far quicker than any competing disk, with only a few eSATA-connected standard hard disks we've tested coming close. Groups of files proved little trouble, either, with 1,000 small files written in 2.8 seconds and read in 1.7.

The results aren't quite the quickest we've ever seen, but the Transcend lags behind internal SSD disks we've tested by mere milliseconds. The fastest drive when handling a single 50MB file, from OCZ, took 0.25s to read and 0.3s to write the file, with the Transcend taking around half a second longer. The Transcend's performance when handling our group of small files was similar, with the fastest SSD we've seen taking 1.2 seconds to read the files, as opposed to 1.7s from the Transcend.

The performance isn't to be sniffed at, then, but neither is the price. With a recommended retail price of £270 before VAT, it's expensive - our favourite portable external hard disk, made by Plextor, offers 320GB of storage for less than £80. If you just need somewhere to store music and pictures, then a traditional platter-based disk is a far wiser investment. For all of its rapid performance and tiny dimensions, the Transcend is only worth considering if you're willing to pay top dollar and demand lightning speed.

Author: Mike Jennings