Final Words - Transcend SSD370 (128GB, 256GB & 512GB) Review
Final Words
From the performance perspective, the SSD370 is a very competitive value drive. It doesn't top the charts, but it provides a very good balance of consistency and peak performance. In most workloads, particularly our real-world testing, the SSD370 performs better than the MX100 and Ultra II, which have been my go-to value drives. Under very intensive workloads, the ARC 100 is slightly faster thanks to its great consistency, but most people who are looking for value drives won't have such harsh usage anyway.
The lack of DIPM support and the high slumber power consumption is a bit disappointing, though. Given how similar modern SSDs are in terms of performance, the power consumption really matters because additional battery life is easier to notice and more concrete than a few percent increase in performance. Obviously that doesn't apply to desktop users, but the majority of PCs are laptops now, so it just seems illogical to disable DIPM. Hopefully that's something Transcend can enable through a firmware update.
The pricing of the SSD370 is extremely competitive. It's practically undercutting the MX100 and Ultra II, which makes it one of the cheapest value drives on the market, and the SSD370 is also listed at even lower prices on Amazon Prime right now. Only the ARC 100 is cheaper, but on the other hand it also lacks support for low power states and doesn't come in 1TB capacity either.
I don't hand out the "Recommended by AnandTech" award very often, but I think it's justified in this case. It's not an overstatement to say that the SSD370 is overall the highest performing value drive and on top of that the pricing is very alluring. I would still, however, recommend the MX100 and Ultra II for users that are concerned about battery life because of SSD370's high idle power consumption. If Transcend SSD370 was able to fix that through a firmware update, it would be safe to say that the SSD370 would be the best value SSD on the market.
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