Drives of the 230S series from Transcend are positioned by the manufacturer as an affordable replacement for traditional hard drives. Their price tags are slightly higher than the average temperature in the ward, and the list of advantages should include a 5-year warranty, an increased MTBF and, in some cases, an additional RAM cache chip.


The main fundamental difference between this series and other SSD lines was the variety of forms. This is one of the rare families in which classic SATA SSDs peacefully coexist, fast M.2 SSDs that work using the NVMe protocol, and not quite typical mini-SATA drives. These are extremely tiny drives with a PCB area 8 times smaller than a classic SATA 2.5 SSD. Their main scope is ultrabooks, tablets and ultra-compact servers.

In the case of M.2 and 2.5 format models, everything is more familiar. The former provide linear read speeds up to 3500 MB / s, in the second case, operating speeds are limited by the bandwidth of the SATA 3 bus and do not exceed 550 — 560 MB. The efficient operation of both drives is ensured by the memory controller from Silicon Motion, and there is an additional DRAM cache on board to reduce speed drawdowns. In addition, the 230S series SSDs support hardware error correction and wear leveling, SMART monitoring, flexible power management, and TRIM command.