Transcend PCIe 220S M.2 NVMe 256GB SSD Review

[Ria Averee]

Back at the 2019 Taiwan Excellence Esports Cup held in the Philippines, we encountered several of Transcend’s new storage solutions such as portable SSDs and one PCIe SSD. Now, the latter of which, the Transcend PCIe SSD 220S M.2 SSD to be specific, has just arrived in our labs for testing. And that’s what we’re going to do today.

Technical Specifications:

Flash Type: 3D NAND Flash
Capacity: 256GB / 512GB / 1TB
Dimensions: 80 mm x 22 mm x 3.58 mm
Bus Interface: NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4

PERFORMANCE

The PCIe SSD 2200S is an M.2 NVMe drive designed for high-end applications including gaming, the enterprise, digital audio and video production, and other applications that require speed and consistency. The model that we have right now, the 256GB variant, sits at the base of the lineup. Transcend claims that this variant can deliver up to 3,300/1,100MB/s on CrystalDiskMark. The MTBF is rated at 2,000,000 for all variants available.

Test System Setup

Motherboard: GIGABYTE AB350M-DH3

CPU: AMD Athlon 200GE

GPU: AMD Radeon Vega 3

RAM: ZADAK 16GB DDR4 RAM 2400 MHz

Cooler: Noctua NH-U12A

Storage: Plextor M9e 512GB M.2 SSD

PSU:EVGA 500W BV
CaseeepCool Tesseract

OS: Windows 10 Pro N

Display: BenQ GW2270H 21.5-inch Full HD Monitor

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark is an industry leading benchmark that help measure performance of system storage such as hard drives, solid state drives, RAID arrays, and so forth.

Crystal Disk Mark

Here’s another one of the storage benchmark standards with Crystal Disk Mark to measure both of its read and write rates through a series of tests.

Real World Performance

For the real world performance, we’ll be using a set of 20GB file consisting of 119 video files, as well as an archived 16GB to test it out. To note, the file/s will be copied directly from the same drive. The time is measured in seconds, and of course, lower is better.

CONCLUSION

NVMe M.2 SSDs are paving the way for high-speed storage for primary drives, and it’s just so hard to get back to traditional HDDs afterwards. And why would you even? NVMe M.2 SSD prices keep on going lower, especially with the advent of PCIe Gen 4 SSDs. As far as the Transcend PCIe SSD 220S is concerned, well, we can’t find the price for the model we have, but we did encounter the price for the 512GB model for around $74. With that said, competition is fierce, with other NVMe drives in this segment priced lower. Once we nail down the MSRP for the 256GB, we’ll make a proper conclusion on this one. But for now, let the numbers speak.