Transcend 32GB & 256GB SSD with JM616 Review

Real world tests – 1-year old OS Preparations

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For this test, we use an OS installation that has been in everyday use over the past year.  This OS has had many applications installed, updated and removed over the year and is rather cluttered at this stage.  As this installation has been performing very well on an OCZ Agility 60GB SSD, practically no maintenance has been carried out over the year.  In fact, the only performance tweak that we can recall being carried out is from Registry Booster 2010, which we reviewed earlier.  This drive image remains unchanged from our previous Transcend SSD review, so the only preparation for this test was cloning this image to the new Transcend 256GB SSD and setting the PC’s clock back to the 26^th September 2010 to prevent the date sensitive software trying to check for updates or complaining about being out of date (e.g. antivirus).

The drive image was in the following state as prepared in our previous Transcend SSD review:

• Software versions:
• Firefox 3.6.10
• Google Chrome 6.0.472.63
• Safari 5.0.2
• Opera 10.62
• GIMP 2.6.10
• Microsoft Office 2010 Professional
• VLC 1.1.4
• FileZilla 3.3.4.1
• Folder containing 18,622 JPEG pictures (3.09GB) across 1,177 folders.

As the 60GB OCZ Agility was filled to about 90% capacity with this test OS installation, we were unable to clone this to the 32GB Transcend SSD, so this SSD has not been included in these tests.  While 90% capacity is well beyond what most SSD critics would dare place on an SSD, these tests will give an idea of what the Transcend 256GB would be like as either an upgrade path or how the OS would perform had the user been using this SSD all along.  As this image only fills a quarter of the 256GB SSD capacity, we will also carry out a few tests to see what impact takes place when this SSD is filled to capacity.

No defragmentation or other performance tweaks were carried out before or after cloning the disk, so for the HDDs, this also gives an idea of what the performance is like on the HDDs in the current partition and fragmentation state.

Upgrading OpenOffice 3.2.0 to 3.2.1

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While installing OpenOffice may seem like a heavy enough chore to carry out, upgrading OpenOffice can be more tedious, as part of the installation involves removing the old version.  Like a full installation, upgrading consists of two stages – unpacking and installing.  As we need to go through the setup wizard between these two stages, we time them separately and give the total time as on the last page.  The virus checker was disabled for this test.

Like the clean OS test, the JM616 really helped out in this test, with the upgrade again taking under half the time of the older 256GB model.  The OCZ Agility on the other hand took nearly four times longer, with the main culprit likely being its 90% filled state, since this leaves it with very little space for background house-cleaning (TRIM, garbage collection, etc.)  For a laptop user, the new 256GB model would be a major improvement either as an upgrade over the hard disk or even the Agility 60GB.   

Shutdown

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How much longer does this installation take to shut down?  Let’s find out …

The new Transcend SSD took a little longer than the older model to shut down, but double the length of the clean OS installation.  On the other hand, it’s still an improvement over the two hard disks.  We’re not quite sure why timings of the two hard disks worked out this way, especially with the 2.5” HDD shutting down quicker than the clean install, never mind the desktop HDD here.

Booting up and launching applications

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With a fresh or well-maintained Windows installation, the OS can be made to boot up very quickly even on a hard disk.  As we have been using our Windows 7 installation on an SSD over the past year, we carried out very little maintenance simply because the OS seemed to run fast enough and also because SSDs do not need defragmentation.   So let’s see how this OS performs mirrored over to the new Transcend 256GB SSD as well our 2.5” and 3.5” traditional spinning hard disks and the older Transcend 256GB SSD for reference.  As NOD32 antivirus automatically enables itself at start-up, the antivirus was enabled for this test on all drives.

For this test, we launch 14 popular applications as well as three in Windows XP mode.  The Windows XP Mode virtual disk (VHD file) is located on the OS partition, which in turn is the same drive being tested.

Due to the number of applications launched in this test, these are grouped as follows in the graph:

• Boot – Time taken to reach the desktop and click on the IE8 icon.
• Browsers – Total time taken to launch all five web browsers.
• E-mail – Time taken to launch Thunderbird.
• Office – Total time taken to launch Word 2010, Publisher 2010 and OpenOffice Writer.
• Various – Total time taken to launch VLC, GIMP and FileZilla.
• XP Mode – Total time taken to launch virtual PC and Windows XP mode.
• XP Apps – Total time taken to launch IE8, Word 2007 and Publisher 2007 in XP mode.

Windows XP mode was fully shut down prior to running each test.  The boot and Windows XP mode launch timings are shown in seconds in the blue and orange segments, respectively.

When compared with the clean OS, the time it takes Windows to reach the desktop increases by 9 seconds for the new SSD and 16 seconds for the older SSD.  However, once the desktop appears, applications load up about as quickly as with the clean OS, at least for the directly comparable applications.  By the time we have all the applications including Windows XP mode launched, the new SSD gives a 9 second improvement over the older model.  When compared with the two hard disks, we once again see some impressive times.  For example, the new 256GB has everything launched by the time the desktop HDD has just the five web browsers open.  So whether one owns a laptop or desktop, one thing for sure is that these SSDs are quick to get the operating system booted and applications up and running.    

With the hard disks, the Windows XP mode seems to be the most disk intensive application to launch, taking almost two minutes just to start it up and launch the three applications within it.  By the time the test completes, both Transcend 256GB SSDs have taken under half the time of the desktop HDD and under a third of the time of the laptop HDD. 

Read a set of files

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On the test drive, we have a folder containing 18,622 JPEG pictures ranging in size up to 750KB, totalling 3.09GB in a hierarchy of 1,177 folders.  For this test, we use the command prompt to read this entire file set and time the duration.  As no data is written, this test runs as fast as the files can be read.  Most disk intensive operations involve reading files, such as backing data up, carrying out a virus scan, indexing photos, in-depth searches on e-mails/documents and so on, so faster the faster the result, the quicker these types of tasks will perform.

When reading a large set of small files, we can again clearly see the advantage with SSDs due to their low access times.  The fragmentation state of the partition also likely had a negative impact on the two HDDs due to us not defragging the HDDs.  For this test, the newer 256GB SSD takes slightly longer than the older model. 

Launching applications while reading a set of files

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We reboot the PC and read the same file set again, this time timing the launching of 12 applications.

To make the graph easier to read, we grouped the applications as follows in the graph:

• Browsers – Total time taken to launch all five web browsers.
• E-mail – Time taken to launch Thunderbird.
• Office – Total time taken to launch Word 2010, Publisher 2010 and OpenOffice Writer.
• Others – Total time taken to launch VLC, GIMP and FileZilla. 

With an HDD, the read head can only be at one point on the platter surface at any given time, so multitasking is a major weakness for hard disks.  SSDs on the other hand don’t have this issue and this test clearly shows how background disk activity can seriously degrade the performance of anything that requires disk access, in this case launching applications.  This is why when a scheduled virus scan or backup takes place, the OS can become painfully slow to use.  Unlike the extraction & launch test in our clean-OS, the JM616 controller does not really offer much of an improvement over the JM612 when it comes to read multitasking. 

In this test, the Transcend SSDs take a significant lead, completing the launches almost 7 times quicker than the desktop HDD!

Summary

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As expected, both hard disks had a serious blow in performance in these tests with the Transcend SSD performing well ahead in every test here.  Sure a disk defragmentation and windows maintenance may have helped the two HDDs, but how often does the average user remember to carry out maintenance, let alone defrag their hard disk? 

In the multitasking test where we read a set of files in the background, the Transcend SSDs clearly came out in top of this test, running 7 times quicker than the desktop hard disk.  This means that users who run a scheduled virus scan, PC backup, etc. are unlikely to notice any impact in performance while the disk intensive process takes place.

When comparing the newer Transcend 256GB with the earlier model, most of the tests here gave roughly equal performance, apart from a further improvement in booting the computer and launching applications.  The only test where the newer model clearly outperformed the earlier one is during the upgrading of OpenOffice. 

Now we will take a look at how the new Transcend 256GB performs with its unpartitioned space filled up.

Booting up and launching applications – Part 2

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In our earlier boot-up test, we had the OCZ Agility 60GB SSD filled to ~90%.  While we made a mirror image of this drive to the Transcend 256GB, this resulted in a partition only occupying about ¼ of the SSD capacity, since the Transcend SSD has 4 times the capacity of the source OCZ Agility SSD.  For the Agility, this left it with very little room to carry out its internal housekeeping such as TRIM and garbage collection, while the Transcend SSD had at least ¾ of the SSD capacity for this, which might explain why the OCZ drive did much worse in these OS tests.

So in this test we create a partition the size of the remaining capacity of the Transcend 256GB SSD and fill this partition to capacity by copying a 1GB archive over in a loop to both partitions.  We then free up ~4GB of space and copy over our pictures file set that we used earlier.  We then fill the remaining space of both partitions with further pictures and finally, we delete these files off the OS partition.  This means that the SSD is now in a totally dirty state and has just this free space as well as its overprovisioned space to work with:

We then leave the PC idle for 30 minutes to allow the SSD to carry out any housekeeping.

The following graph shows the results, with the application time groupings the same as the earlier test:

Sure enough, filling the unused partition space had an impact on performance, this time when launching the browsers.  For the earlier model, the browsers and XP mode launch times all had a noticeable impact.  However, this impact is still very small with the overall impact being 6 seconds slower by the end of the test, but still 24 seconds quicker than the OCZ Agility and a few seconds quicker than the older 256GB model that wasn’t filled.

Read a set of files – Part 2

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As we copied our large set of files to the new partition just before we filled up the last bit of space, we will now read this file set to see if it takes any longer than the file set we had on the original OS partition. 

This time we see a significant drop in performance, but again this is still one third of the time taken by the desktop HDD, which took 3:02 earlier. 

Launching applications while reading a set of files – Part 2

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For this test, we read the large set of small files we placed on the new partition.  With this taking place, we time the launching of the same 12 applications, grouped in the graph as earlier.

This time we actually see a slight improvement, but unless timed like this, the effect is negligible, much like how the earlier SSD dropped by a second with its second partition filled.    

Summary for part 2

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Some SSD critics say that an SSD should not be filled beyond 50% capacity.  On this page of tests, the OCZ Agility struggled quite a lot through these tests, especially when compared to the clean-OS tests with our previous Transcend SSD where the OCZ Agility was included.  This was likely attributed to it being filled to almost 90% capacity, so we were curious to see what impact filling the Transcend 256GB SSD would have, like we did in our previous Transcend SSD review.  As we can see here, the actual impact is very small to negligible.  Also, by filling up the unpartitioned space, we actually filled this SSD to about 97% capacity, since 7.25GB is 12% of 59.5GB, but only 3% of 237.5GB. 

With SSD’s high price per Gigabyte, it’s nice to see that filling the Transcend 256GB has a very little impact on its read performance.  However, due to the potential negative impact this has on wear-levelling, we would strongly recommend not keeping an SSD filled to capacity over a long period, especially an SSD used as the OS drive or for regular write operations.

Let’s head on to the next page where we also test write performance as the SSD fills up…

• Real world - Clean fresh OS
• Fill `er Up!