Transcend PCIe SSD220S TS256GMTE220S 256 GB

Just like the entire computer has a processor, the SSD has its own controller, on which the characteristics of the drive largely depend. Until recently, the situation in the controller market was as follows: first-tier manufacturers like WD, Samsung and Intel were engaged in their production, and everyone else had to be content with affordable, but not always convenient controllers from Phison and Silicon Motion.

New Dual Core Silicon Motion SM2262EN Controller

Why such a long prelude? In addition, in 2018, Silicon Motion released a very attractive SM2262 controller, which imposed competition on big players. A year later, the situation on the drive market changed and Silicon Motion released an updated version of SM2262EN, which provided a serious increase in speed and stability. Based on this controller, you should look for a new inexpensive SSD. This option is the hero of this review Transcend TS256GMTE220S, which, thanks to the use of four PCI-E 3.0 lanes, gives a sequential read speed of 3300 MB / s (almost the maximum interface bandwidth) and 1100 MB / s with sequential write. The IOPS (the number of input-output operations per second) for the smallest 4K blocks of the Transcend MTE220S is a decent 210K for reading and 290K for writing.

256 MB SLC buffer

An important feature of the Transcend TS512GMTE220S is an external 256 MB SLC caching chip: with continuous data recording, the speed drops almost three times over time (up to 500 – 600 MB / s). That is, to the level of a conventional SATA SSD. And when deleting a large file of 30 – 40 GB, the drive needs a couple of seconds to recover. If you moved from the reference Samsung Evo 970, it may be inconvenient, but if you used a regular HDD or SSD before, you won’t notice any drawdowns. The volume of the SLC cache itself is just over 10% of the free space, so the more you have, the less often you will experience slowdowns. Another plus compared to a conventional SATA SSD will be the warranty period extended to 5 years.