Transcend SSD370 128GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD Review
Inside The Transcend SSD370
To get inside the Transcend SSD370 you just need to flip the drive over and remove the warranty seal at the end of the drive. Once that single Philips screw is removed you can pop off the plastic cover and get inside the drive. It should be noted that tampering with this sticker will void the SSDs warranty.
Once the plastic cover was removed you can finally see the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) used on the SSD370 128GB drive. On this side you can see a Transcend branded controller, Samsung DDR3 DRAM cache chip. four MLC NAND Flash chips and the other usual surface-mounted components.
We’ve seen many SSDs with thermal pads covering some of the ‘hot’ power management components to help dissipate the heat, but this drive has a couple pads on it for reasons unknown.
On the reverse you’ll find four more MLC NAND chips, which gives you a grand total of 8.
Here is the Transcend TS6500 controller that powers the SSD370. This is what Transcend has to say about the TS6500:
“New controller with the marking TS6500 is Transcend self-owned controller & developed together with SMI. For customers who adopt this solution, Transcend is able to provide them high reliability/quality guarantee, and comprehensive technical supports ranging from the very beginning spec-in phase to after-sales product supports, giving customers more smooth experience of using Transcend products.”
That said, we know that this is a re-branded Silicon Motion SM2246EN SATA III 6Gbps SSD controller running unmodified firmware. Silicon Motion (SMI) has had pretty good success lately with the SM2246EN SATA 3 SSD controller as the Corsair Force LX, ADATA SP610, PNY Optima, Angelbird WRK SSD series all use the SMI SM2246EN SSD controller.
The SM2246EN controller is built on the 55nm manufacturing processor and a four-channel SATA III controller design with one single 32-bit ARC-based processing core. The block diagram of the SMI SM2246EN can be seen above if you are curious about the design.
It looks like Transcend is using Micron L85A 20nm MLC NAND Flash memory from IM Flash Technologies (IMFT) on this particular drive. The exact part number that has been laser etched into each package is PFC52-IOAL.
Here is a closer look at the Samsung 1Gb DDR3 SDRAM G-die with part number K4B1G1646G-BCH9 that handles any caching that the drive needs.
Let’s take a look at the test system and then performance.