Transcend SSD370 128GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD Review

Transcend SSD370 in An Intel NUC DN2820FYKH

We can imagine that many people will be interested in putting the Transcend SSD370 128GB drive in a system like the Intel NUC DN2820FYKH since it is an inexpensive desktop PC (at $142 shipped) that needs a 2.5-inch storage drive to work. The Transcend SSD370 128GB SSD at $69.99 shipped would be a drive for this system as it uses the SATA II 3.0 Gbit/s interface. This means the performance will be limited to around 250MB/s. That means we won’t be coming close to the drives 570MB/s read speed, but all of a sudden that 170MB/s write speed doesn’t sound too bad. Not to mention we all know that the 4K performance numbers are what make SSD’s shine and the SATA II interface is plenty fast enough for this SSDs 4K speeds.

In the Intel NUC DN2820FYKH the Transcend SSD370 128GB SSD was the primary drive and we were getting 256MB/s read and 164MB/s write speeds. The 4K speeds were 24MB/s read and 54MB/s write. Remember on our main test system with this SSD as a secondary SATA III drive we saw 546MB/s read and 164MB/s write on the sequential test. So, on a SATA II system we are clearly performance capped on the read side when it comes to sequential operations, but that was really it.

The boot times of the Intel NUC system were pretty damn fast as we were booting into Windows 7 Pro 64-bit in just about 20 seconds flat! The Transcend SSD370 128GB drive felt great in the Intel NUC and it gave us the responsiveness and reliability that we were looking for in a system that comes far from breaking the bank.