PC users have been backing up their data for years, and most sensible users have used either optical media or an external HDD for this purpose. An external HDD makes so much sense these days, the capacity is large and an HDD is certainly more robust than optical media. USB3 is almost perfect for an external HDD, it’s much faster than USB2 and only requires a single cable to send and receive data and supply the power to the drive, unlike eSATA which requires a secondary power source.

The Transcend StoreJet 25M3 and 25D3 performed extremely well in our tests. They were capable of transferring large files from our host PC at very nearly 100MB per second, much faster than USB2 and as fast as eSATA. Small files such as MP3 audio files also proved to be no trouble at all to the StoreJet 25M3 and 25D3, and small file transfer speeds were also very impressive for a 2.5 inch HDD.

The Transcend StoreJet 25M3 and 25D3 were also nicely styled and constructed very robustly. My personal favourite was the StoreJet 25M3, it was nice to handle as well as looking great.

Noise and vibration levels were extremely low, and this is something that I personally find important. I just hate background noise, and the StoreJet 25M3 and 25D3 proved to be extremely quiet in operation.

The only real negative thing we could say about the Transcend StoreJet 25M3 and 25D3 was, the supplied USB3 cable was rather short at 1 meter in length. We would like to see the cable length being increased to 1.5 meters.

Price

We found the Transcend StoreJet 25M3 for sale at Amazon UK for £81.83, which is 98.46 Euros at the current exchange rate. The US price for the Transcend StoreJet 25M3 is $99 at the time of writing. Amazon UK also stocked the StoreJet 25D3 for a very reasonable £87.36, or 105.11 Euros at the current exchange rate.

For an external USB3 2.5 inch HDD, the price is attractive.

Conclusion

The Transcend StoreJet 25M3 and 25D3 are attractive, affordable, fast, and quiet, and make perfect sense for backing up files that you intend to carry from one place to the next.

With very little negative things to mention and loads of good things to say, we decided to give the Transcend StoreJet 25M3 and 25D3 our MyCE.com “Safe Buy” award.

You may comment on this review below.

Thanks to:

EFD Software for providing the fully licensed versions of HD Tune Pro

Real world tests

13 Comments on Transcend StoreJet 25M3 and 25D3 USB3 HDD review

DrageMester: Posts: 19885; Posted on: 08 Sep 10 14:15

Thanks for the review, Dee.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Review

While we were not able to measure the actual power consumption of the Transcend StoreJet 25M3 and 25D3 USB3 external HDD. We can state that the both drives ran perfectly on two PCs and a Fujitsu laptop, without the need for the additional USB power cable. So I think it would be safe to say that these drives do not consume a large amount of power.

I have a couple of external Samsung S2 Portable 640 GB drives (2.5" USB 2.0 containing two different versions of the HM641JX drive), and they are less power-hungry than most of my other older 2.5" external drives - based not on direct power measurements but rather on which drives succeed or fail to start depending on the port and cable used.

Given that my drives fail to start when using some combinations of USB ports and USB cables, and given that one of these drives IIRC has 0.8 A max power requirement, I'd say it's unlikely that the Transcend drives stay within the official power specs of 0.5 A for USB 2.0 - but this is obviously only an educated guess since the controllers in the USB 3.0 drives are not the same as in my USB 2.0 drives. Since the official power spec for USB 3.0 has been increased to 0.9 A, the Transcend drives are probably within the new spec, but again only an educated guess.

DrageMester: Posts: 19885; Posted on: 08 Sep 10 14:21

From the review:

Quote:

http://gfx.cdfreaks.com/reviews/tran...w/image043.png

There is only a 7% difference between the best and worst result, but the non-zero based X-axis makes it seem at first glance, that the fastest drive is more than twice as fast as the slowest drive.

This is the kind of graph manipulation I don't like in many reviews around the Internet, and that I hoped to not see in reviews here.

Dee: Posts: 12811; Posted on: 08 Sep 10 17:32

The graph is not manipulated, it's the default from Excel.

Dee: Posts: 12811; Posted on: 08 Sep 10 21:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by DrageMester

From the review:

There is only a 7% difference between the best and worst result, but the non-zero based X-axis makes it seem at first glance, that the fastest drive is more than twice as fast as the slowest drive.

This is the kind of graph manipulation I don't like in many reviews around the Internet, and that I hoped to not see in reviews here.

Ah, I see what you mean, now.

Fixed

DrageMester: Posts: 19885; Posted on: 08 Sep 10 21:24

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dee

Ah, I see what you mean, now.

Fixed

That's much better, thanks!

shokdev007: Posts: 1; Posted on: 10 Sep 10 08:03

This is awesome, I also had rumors that Dell is planning to release external HDD's that work like you normal memory stick and the first sizes they are planning to release range from 4 TB and they are willing to sell them at a cheaper price that is between $40 to $50.

I can't wait to see release of this formation from Dell.

:-)

mejobloggs: Posts: 6; Posted on: 04 Oct 10 05:17

"If you have an older motherboard which doesn’t already have USB3 onboard, there is no need to panic. You can quite easily add USB3 support to your existing motherboard by means of a USB3 PCIe card. They are inexpensive, and a good card can be purchased for under £30."

It should work fine in a USB 2 port though right? Just slower?

Dee: Posts: 12811; Posted on: 04 Oct 10 09:27

Yes it works fine on a USB2 port, just much slower.

AnoDyNoS: Posts: 2; Posted on: 05 Oct 10 09:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dee

Yes it works fine on a USB2 port, just much slower.

I bought a StoreJet 25M3 500GB yesterday - it just SUCKS on USB2.0 mode... just over 10MB/sec write and a mere ~25 read... I 've had so much better performance for years... I m taking it back for sure... It should have a warning on the box "crippled USB 2.0 compatibility"...

Dee: Posts: 12811; Posted on: 05 Oct 10 13:52

It's only crippled on USB2 because USB2 is the limiting factor. Even an SSD on USB2 sucks, USB2 can't even supply enough bandwidth to write a DVD disc in a modern DVD drive at full speed.
That is why i said in the article that a USB3 card (if your motherboard doesn't have it built in) makes perfect sense if you wan't to get the best out of these USB3 HDDs.

AnoDyNoS: Posts: 2; Posted on: 05 Oct 10 15:28

With all due respect, I believe you're wrong in your thinking - here's why :

With USB2.0, on the same laptop computer (ACER 8920), I m used to getting roughly 30Mbytes/Sec both for read & write (big files) on my external USB2.0 WD Passport.

With Transcend 25M3, the USB 2.0 compatibility mode offers me almost 1/3 of that for write operations. Even if USB3.0 mode is a lot faster (I still haven't tested), I would expect to get the maximum transfer possible with USB2.0 operation that most computers have and not a crippled one (~11MB/sec). With one word : USB2.0 operation is crippled - the device is not using the full transfer capabilities of USB2.0.

To be quite fair, its perhaps its because the laptop isn't providing eough power to the USB device - I will test with the extra power cable & I''ll get back to you. But still I think Transcend 25M3 is crippled for USB2.0 operations on my laptop, which is a shame.

DrageMester: Posts: 19885; Posted on: 05 Oct 10 15:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by AnoDyNoS

To be quite fair, its perhaps its because the laptop isn't providing eough power to the USB device - I will test with the extra power cable & I''ll get back to you.

In my experience, USB harddrives either get enough power and work at full speed, or they don't get enough power and either fail to start or disconnect immediately after starting. I've never seen a case of reduced speed due to lack of power.

Welcome to the MyCE forums!

Dee: Posts: 12811; Posted on: 05 Oct 10 19:08

From the review
25M3 connected to USB2
http://gfx.cdfreaks.com/reviews/tran...w/image054.png

BTW: Did you reformat the partition to NTFS and try it?

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