The main fundamental difference between the Transcend 220 SSD and other brand drives is the variety of shapes. Transcend focuses on a variety of categories of users, be it owners of old laptops, console gamers or owners of brand new PCs, so in the ranks of the 220 series you can equally well find both a fast ultra-compact M.2 SSD and an orthodox 2.5-inch drive with a connection via SATA 3 bus.


In the case of SATA 3 class models, we are talking about massive entry-level drives that do not pretend to perform any feats. Such options typically support wear leveling technologies, advanced hardware error correction, SMART monitoring, flexible power management, and TRIM commands. Linear read and write speeds are limited by the capabilities of the SATA 3 bus and do not exceed 550–560 MB/s. In 2023, the main charm of the 2.5-inch format is its omnivorousness - with a 99.9% probability, such an option will connect even to very old hardware.

At the same time, the manufacturer is clearly aware that the time of such drives is running out, so some new products of the 220 series had to be brought up to modern form factor standards, using more modern flash memory and current controller models. As a rule, these are moderately fast, relatively inexpensive and compact M.2 drives with support for the NVMe interface and linear read/write speeds from 1000 to 3500 MB/s. Such a noticeable difference in performance depends on the supported version of the PCI-E bus - the third or fourth.