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Transcend 64gb MLC Drive
 

The Transcend 64gb SATA drive is a sound and affordable execution of a Flash Drive for medium and light duty use in Laptops and Workstations. The performance results suggest that this device will random read significantly faster than a standard laptop hard disk, and in small data sizes and inodes will write on partity with a laptop hard disk. The place where this drive is known to perfom poorly vis-a-vis a hard disk is in large sized records. Here, because of the design of the device, random write speeds tend to fall back to +/- 5mb/sec. This performance glitch can be seen in the performance graph.

MFT can typically improve the overall performance of this drive approximately 10-fold. It will also improve the practical write life of the drive more than 50-fold, assuming that this device uses a 2mb erase block. It is unclear whether this device uses such a block size. Given that we have to specify a 16mb block size in order to achieve high speed writes of >30mb a second, it may be that this device does in fact use the larger size. Were this so, the drive life would be improved by a further factor of eight, and we would be concerned about the life of the drive without MFT. But given the lack of information on the device, we presume a typical design convention of 2mb erase blocks.

If you are a power-user, MFT is a must because of both the performance and life gains. If you are thinking about using this drive in a server, that is fine also provided the server has a small storage footprint. The need to use a 16mb write block could be an issue if you are using a large number of drives in an array. But with two or three drives only this should not be too much of a problem.

Transcend MLC Drive Manufacturer's Specifications
SuperTalent MasterDrive MX
Manufacturer's Page http://TranscendUSA.com
Manufacturer's Warranty 2 Year
Flash Media Type MLC
Flash Media Erase Life 5,000?? (Unspecified)
Size 2.5"
Case Plastic
Format SATA-II
Linear Read Speed 118mb/sec
Linear Write Speed 37mb/sec
Access Time Tested as +/- 0.5
Sizes and Models
30GB TS32GSSD25S-M
60GB TS64GSSD25S-M
Important Note: Manufacturer's specifications deviate in signficant ways from our tested results.
Transcend MLC Performance Graph
Transcend MLC Drive Performance Results
Block
Size
Random Read Tests: Random Write Tests Random Write with MFT (computed)
1 Thread 10 Threads 1 Thread 10 Threads 1 Thread
IOPS BW IOPS BW IOPS BW IOPS BW IOPS BW
4k 1,989 7.5M 2,144 8.0M 82 331K 69 278K 4,203 17.2M
8k 1,924 14.7M 2,096 15.6M 64 516K 65 522K 2,452 19.1M
16k 1,796 27.3M 1,915 29.2M 75 1.2M 77 1.2M 1,839 28.7M
32k 1,452 44.2M 1,543 46.8M 70 2.1M 75 2.3M 969 30.3M
64k 1,273 77.6M 1,366 82.8M 60 3.8M 69 4.3M 483 30.2M
256k 412 103.0M 433 108.3M 12 3.1K 21 5.2M 253 31.4M
1mb 111 113.0M 115 115.1M 4 4.0M     31 31.6M
2mb 55 111.5M 58 117.0M 3 6.5M     16 32.7M
Aggregate IOPS without MFT 207 Higher is better. A single 15,000 rpm SAS drive has a value of 250, and a 7,200 rpm SATA drive rates at 70. Click here for explanation of calculation methodology.
Aggregate IOPS with MFT 1,966

Important Note and Warning! The values for MFT have been computed rather than generated due to the SuperTalent device's variance between linear write speed and the random write speed of large data elements such as the 2mb blocks that MFT writes. The performance of this device with MFT is significantly poorer than with plain vanilla CF cards. This product is not recommended for use with MFT. With reference to use in Laptops and workstations, it is not clear if this device uses some sort of ring buffer to accelerate random writes. If a 32gb variant of this product uses traditional random writing methods, and uses 10,000 life MLC media, then writing at an average rate in excess of 1gb per day will wear it out in less than 5 years. Power users are cautioned to use larger drive sizes such as the 60gb or 120gb models.

Transcend MLC Random Writes Permissible for 5-Year Drive Life
  7,200 rpm
SATA HDD
15,000 rpm
SAS HDD
32GB
Drive
64GB
Drive
128GB
Drive
Maximum write throughput per day without MFT 19GB 69GB 0.5GB 1GB 2GB
Maximum write throughput per day with MFT n/a n/a 26GB 52GB 104GB
Hours per day needed to finish read/write activity 24.00 24.00 0.62 1.23 2.46
Drive Utilization Percentage 100% 100% 3% 5% 10%
Thruput per day is based upon an average data size of 10.66kb and a read/write mix of 70% reads and 30% writes. As we do not have published information from the manufacturer, we have used a preumed erase life of 5,000 cycles erase cell as this is the quality standard for normal MLC Flash memory. The values shown for the 7,200 and 15,000 rpm Hard Disks are the maximum possible attainable values if these drives are run at 100% duty cycle 7x24. Values for the flash media are calculated as described here. Here, the limit to throughput is not time, but rather the number of safely available write cycles based upon a goal-life of at least five years.
Distributors Offering this Product Bundled with MFT