Any experience Transcend TS16GSSD25-S 16GB SLC SSD? *PICS*

[rkawakami]

I'm thinking of installing an SSD inside an X22 for my daughter's use as a classroom note-taker / MS Office document generator. Currently I have a 60GB Seagate drive in there but don't relish the thought of her banging around the system during her jaunts between classes, not to mention the relatively poor battery life that's probably left in the packs that I have. It's either an SSD or plugging in a CF card into the built-in slot of the X22 and hoping that the HD spins down enough to save on battery life (and head crashes ).

Found the 16GB Transcend TS16GSSD25-S drive at newegg for $150 and was wondering if anybody here has used this SSD. Comments pro and con are welcomed. If there is another drive at around the same price and capacity, and is also built using SLC technology, then I'm all ears too .

[georgelam]

I am very curious about this too. I don't have this exact drive (though thinking about getting one too), but have the MLC, 32GB version (TS32GSSD25-M) in a T42. Just like many other MLC SSDs, this one has it's own share of freezing/stuttering issues. Having used it daily for the past 6 months, mostly for email/web/Open Office and LaTeX, I find it pretty usable. As long as I don't overload it by trying to do too much at once, the freezing is rare, tends to happen mostly right after startups, and lasts only a few seconds at a time.

If you are planning to get this through Newegg, remember to go through Bing.com to get the cashback (10% right now, I think). Also, PayPal has a promotion for $20 off $200 at Newegg:

http://promotions.newegg.com/PayPal/BTS ... index.html

[rkawakami]

Thanks for the discount info. Hopefully I can make my decision before the Newegg/PayPal offer ends. I'm at around 8.5GB on an XP SP3 install (and all pre-SP3 files deleted) with all of the programs I think she needs (Office, Adobe/Foxit Reader, PaintShopPro, Firefox, IE8) so a 16GB should be plenty for any school related work. Just got a Netgear WG511 v2 card tonight since the X22 I'm prepping for her doesn't have built-in wireless (she's not getting the 9EU X22 I'm typing on at the moment ).

edit 8/29: Well, bit the bullet and ordered this Transcend 16GB SSD off of Buy.com for $155 (tax and shipping included; used my Buy.com Visa card for points and credit). I'll try to post some data on the drive if I get some time... need to research some HD throughput / benchmarking tools so I can see how fast / slow this SSD really is.

[rkawakami]

Finally got around to installing the Transcend drive today. Received it from Buy.com on 9/1 (FedEx Home). Mounted the X22 into the X2 Ultrabase, put the Transcend drive into an Ultrabay 2000 HD adapter (after removing the jumper on the drive; jumper installed across two of the pins is the "master" designation) and booted the system using a Ghost 2003 floppy. First attempt at locating the SSD came up blank . Ejected the HD adapter, looked at it (seemed okay) and then re-installed it. Second boot was better; the drive was seen by Ghost but then it said that the destination was too small . Realized that the "image boot" setting in Ghost was disabled so I enabled it and started the clone. There was about 5.7GB of data on the 60GB Seagate drive so it took about 12 minutes to copy all of the data. Shut down the system, swapped the drives and booted. The Transcend drive was now not seen by the BIOS . After several swappings of the drive and with the SSD being able to boot out of the Ultrabay HD adapter, I figure that I had a problem with the drive selection jumper. Tried the "master" setting and the drive was still not recognized. Moving the jumper to the "cable select" (CSEL) position fixed the problem . Don't believe that I've ever had a problem when cloning drives before with any of the jumpers, mainly because none of the hard drives ever needed any jumpers to be installed. Anyway... I had run CrystalDiskMark on the Seagate Momentus 5400.3 (ST960815A) drive a few days ago and this was the result:



Running CrystalDiskMark on the newly imaged Transcend SSD resulted in these numbers:



Quite a bit of difference! The system seems to be a little bit faster during boot. Launching programs (Word, Firefox) is as fast as before; I have not really noticed any difference. Coming out of Hibernation is quick; noticeably faster than the Seagate drive. Even the HD password system works! What I'm really hoping for is a significant power savings over using a regular hard drive. That's it's also shock-proof is a added benefit .

[mgo]

Thanks for posting the test results of your new SSD, and the tip about CrystalDiskMark, which is simple to use and quick.

In case you might be interested, here are some results from a Intel X23-M 80 gig.
I've included numbers from my mechanical ultra bay drive for comparison. Big difference!

drive E (mechanical in ultra bay)
--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 83.326 MB/s
Sequential Write : 65.018 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 40.940 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 53.723 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.735 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 1.835 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/09/08 1:07:29


===================
drive C (SSD)
--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 127.953 MB/s
Sequential Write : 66.767 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 112.769 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 68.200 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 16.545 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 37.353 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/09/08 1:11:28

drive D (SSD)

--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 130.725 MB/s
Sequential Write : 66.597 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 113.218 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 68.635 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 16.681 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 37.883 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/09/08 1:16:05

[virge]

I'm jumping in a bit late here...

@rkawakami: Like you, I have looked for a reasonably price SSD an older machine. My X30 is banged around quite a bit, so I have it running a 8GB ZIF Sandisk with an adapter. It was cheap. I think the whole contraption was about $30. Don't buy the Intel version. Its a lot slower. There was some stutter (not nearly as much as on the EeePC), but installing flashfire took care of that and its real nice to use. I think its a great program for entry-level SSDs. When I have the time, I also plan on reinstalling XP after aligning the partition. Try googling "ssd partition alignment" without the quotes. Might be worth looking into if you haven't already.

If you don't mind, can you measure the boot time for your X22?

[rkawakami]

Sure, I have to wrestle it away from my daughter but when I do, I'll have some times for you and the total number of processes that launch. I'm running AVG 8.5 so that in itself takes up several processes (and boot time). I think that I can still compare it to the Seagate drive that I had in there before as there shouldn't have been any changes to the installed program base. What should I use as the "finish line" or determining factor that the boot is complete? The desktop gets displayed while background processes are still loading so that's not really a good indicator. Launching Firefox as soon as I can and getting to the home page displayed?

I haven't done anything special to the partitioning for the SSD. I merely cloned the Seagate drive. If I get reports from my daughter that the drive is stuttering or acting up noticeably, then I guess I'll look into it. I don't think that it's going to be an issue simply because she is using the system as a note-taker and probably won't be straining the "disk" that much. If I took the time and streamlined the XP install I think I might have be able to get away with an 8GB drive but I'm lazy and I wanted to be sure that there was enough room for any material that she might need to load (say, a bunch of .PDF files).

[virge]

Thanks Ray. I'm most interested in the time between hitting the power button and Windows being ready to use. I think launching Firefox would be a good test. Seeing how the machines we are using are so different, I don't know if we'll learn too much. I switched over from AVG to Avast when AVG went to version 8. It definitely takes a little longer to load. I just want to see if there is a big difference between a "real" SSD and these dinky netbook SSDs.

8GB is an okay size for me. I just couldn't buy a SSD that costs more than the cost of the entire laptop! The stuttering issue was really prevalent on the EeePC with a 4GB SSD before tweaking. There was a significant delay after the Windows background loaded, and there would be random pauses. Annoying. I'd rather consistently slow, then a fast-slow-fast-slow routine.

[rkawakami]

Here's the data:

Code: Select all

               Transcend 16GB SSD    Seagate 60GB 5400.3
Power up time:    1:29 / 1:28            1:43 / 1:36
Shutdown time:    0:30 / 0:30            0:33 / 0:37
Hibernate:        0:21 / 0:21            0:19 / 0:19
Wake from hib.:   0:20 / 0:19            0:19 / 0:17

All times measured with a 1 second resolution stopwatch using the same X22. System was plugged into an AC adapter and also had a Netgear wireless PCMCIA card installed. Measurements were made twice to see if there was any variation. Power up time was measured from the push of the power button until Firefox displayed the contents of the "C:\Windows" directory; a shortcut was placed in the "Startup" folder so Firefox was automatically launched whenever the system decided it was time. I used Windows (instead of "My Documents") as it contained almost 200 files. Shutdown was timed from when I clicked on the "Turn Off" button, until the power LED went out. Going into hibernation was measured from when the "H" key was pressed at the Windows shutdown screen, until the power LED went out. Coming out of hibernation was a little bit tricky. I stopped timing when the desktop was displayed and the trackpoint was able to move. As you can see, the best gains for the SSD over the Seagate drive were during power up and shutdown. I figured that the SSD would not be too much faster than the HD when going into hibernation; the relatively poor write performance of the SSD is the bottleneck. But I was surprised to see that the Seagate HD beat the SSD when waking from hibernation. I had assumed that the SSD would have the advantage over the HD since waking from hibernation is mainly reads from the disk.

I must have been wrong in my earlier impression that waking from hibernation was quicker with the SSD. I did not take any timing measurements before and just after I swapped the drives 12 days ago. Either something is different between the Seagate hard drive then and now (maybe it was partially defragged or the hibernation file relocated when I cloned it from the SSD today???) or my preception was colored by playing with a "new toy".

In any event, I'm quite happy with the overall performance of this Transcend drive. The system is noticeably cooler and it's downright silent; no soft clicking of the heads, bearing noise, power-up/down whines, nothing... I just wish it didn't cost more than the X22 itself otherwise I might upgrade a few more of my systems.

edit: And here's a quick listing of the processes that launch for this X22. It probably doesn't matter too much as the disk images were functionally identical. I did not do any defragging or any special disk tuning for this test.

Windows XP SP3 running on an 800Mhz 640MB X22. 37 processes with the significant programs being AVG Free 8.5, Netgear WG511T, Thinkpad Configuration, Trackpoint, IBM Connection Wizard, On Screen Manager, and Firefox 3.5.3.

[virge]

Hmm.... I'll try to find sometime tomorrow to run similar tests with my X30. It'll be between a 8gb ZIF SSD and a 120GB 5400RPM Hitachi.

Edit: No time to do this yet. Spent the weekend working on reloading programs and such onto the X61s (wife's laptop) after a HDD failure. Yesterday, the HDD in my T42P (my work laptop) failed. Talk about bad luck. Fortunate that all work files were backed up.... both drives under warranty and less than 3 years old. Who would've thought?

[virge]

Okay, finally a few moments to time my X30. The machine currently has 512MB with a 8GB ZIF SSD mentioned here: Subject: IDE HDD CF/SSD storage benchmark in a X30 **PIC**

From sjthinkpader's chart, Crystal DiskMark numbers are:

Sequential Read: 24.494
Sequential Write: 4.432
Random Read 512kb: 34.211
Random Write 512kb: 1.902
Random Read 4kb: 2.335
Random Write 4kb: 0.040

I had very similar figures originally, but after loading Flashfire, its much improved.

Sequential Read: 27.86
Sequential Write: 22.47
Random Read 512kb: 27.47
Random Write 512kb: 5.585
Random Read 4kb: 7.170
Random Write 4kb: 1.028

My main startup items include the basic IBM Battery Gauge, trackpoint driver, Intel video driver (with tray icon), IBM Hotkey driver, and Avast antivirus. Ramdisk is installed, indexing disabled, prefetching disabled. System cache set to 1GB (usually set to none when I have 1GB memory installed).

Power button to Firefox open, Google homepage loaded: 50 secs. Avast is still loading at this point. The tray icon is there, but not activated yet. Complete bootup (HDD light off): 1min20sec.

Hibernate from bare desktop: 19secs.

Wake from hibernate: 32 seconds from power button to opening Firefox and loading Google homepage.

Shut Down: 52 sec.

I think the big difference in the startup time may be your AVG software. I used to use that and remember that it was quite resource heavy. The shutdown time is slow probably because Flashfire can't help with that.

[Harryc]

Well it's been 11 months since this thread was started, and I was wondering if the Transcend TS16GSSD25-S is still the best SSD in town for an older Thinkpad with an IDE interface? The price is still up there $150, so time has not been our friend on SSD pricing....yet. Ray, how has yours performed over the last year?

[rkawakami]

I'll try to grab the system from my daughter this weekend to see how it's doing but since she hasn't complained about it, then I guess it's still working fine . She has that X22 and a T23 and SL500 to choose from so I'm not sure how much usage it's gotten over the last school year.

I have not checked any SSD prices since buying that drive but I'm not too surprised that they haven't come down. Despite the overall gloomy economy, the flash memory market is still fairly strong and pricing continues to hold.