UK Price: £103
US Price: $148
These days your options for external storage are vast, with just about every speed and capacity readily available, generally at a reasonable price too. Whether you’re after something that’ll fit on your keyring or carry your entire movie collection and fit in your backpack. So what makes today’s candidate standout from the crowd?
Well, the crucial appeal of the Transcend ESD200 is that it offers full desktop SSD performance in a compact, portable package. Available in 128GB and 256GB capacities, it should offer far greater performance and capacity than a typical USB 3.0 thumb drive yet be more portable than either a portable hard drive or a 2.5in SSD coupled with a USB 3.0 adapter.
Transcend has certainly got the small part of the equation right. While the drive is still about the same thickness as a 2.5in SSD, it is some 10mm shorter and narrower. That may not sound like a huge amount but bear in mind this is a protected, fully encased drive, unlike a bare SSD.
That said, because the drive requires a USB 3.0 cable – supplied – to connect to your computer, there is the bulk of that to consider. Either including a really short cable or integrating a cable into the case would’ve made for an even more convenient solution.
The case itself is a simple black plastic affair, with a grey diamond pattern on the top. It’s not exactly the most attractive portable storage solution we’ve ever encountered but it’s reasonably unobtrusive.
A slim, flock-finished protective sleeve is provided to protect the drive from light knocks and scratches. With an open section at one end, you could easily keep the drive in the sleeve all the time, leaving the end with the sockets uncovered.
As well as the micro USB 3.0 connector there’s also a backup button on the same edge, which is used to activate the included backup software.
We didn’t prize the well-sealed drive open to see exactly what was inside but we would assume it uses a standard 1.8in SATA SSD married to a USB 3.0 interface. Transcend claims read and write speeds of 260MB/s and 225MB/s, which would certainly suggest a fairly nippy drive is inside.
In use the drive is as simple as it comes, with it largely being a totally plug and play experience. You can use it in either USB 3.0 or USB 2.0 ports, with the LED hidden below the top surface illuminating blue for the former or yellow for the latter.
One issue we did encounter was that on our normal test PC the drive would continually disconnect when trying to transfer files larger than about 1GB. These issues with USB 3.0 drives are much documented across a number of different types of drive and different PCs, with suggestions as to the problem being an issue with USB 3.0 controllers (it was fine over USB 2.0), issues with Windows 7 power management and simply dodgy cables. We never did quite get to the bottom of this but the drive worked on all the other machines we tried it with. So if you do pick up this drive and have similar issues, it’s likely not the drive’s fault.
Transcend claims inclusion of a backup utility with the drive but in actual fact it’s just a free download from the company’s website. This software is compatible with the hardware backup button on the drive, though.
As we found with the Transcend StoreJet portable hard drive, which includes the same Elite backup utility, the software is very clunky. It offers the basics, including the ability to encrypt your data, but the interface is not all that clever and the one-touch backup is rendered near useless as you have to manually open the software before the button on the drive will do anything.
Likewise the RecoveRx software that offers data recovery for when you want to reclaim files you’ve deleted from the recycle bin. It does work but is totally hamstrung by the fact you have to specify a file type to search for, and it only has a limited selection. All told, you shouldn’t be buying this drive for its software.
When it comes to performance, though, there’s plenty of reason to be tempted. We ran the SSD test suite Crystal Disk Mark and recorded read speeds of 202MB/s and write speeds of 154MB/s. This was actually faster than a desktop SSD – the SanDisk Extreme 240GB – connected via a USB 3.0 adapter. It returned figures of 182MB/s and 177MB/s. It also, of course, obliterated an external hard drive.
Left: Transcend ESD200 / Right: SanDisk Extreme
The SanDisk drive did prove faster in all the other test random read/write tests though. Nonetheless, the transcend ESD200 certainly holds up to its claim of being a seriously speedy external storage solution.
Conclusion
The Transcend ESD200 isn’t setting any new records with either its performance or pocketability but nonetheless it offers genuinely high-end SSD performance in a package that is markedly smaller than a 2.5in SSD. With a price of under £105 it also offers pretty good value for the 128GB model.
It’s a shame Transcend couldn’t match the quality of the drive with the included software, which is hardly worth downloading. But, if you’re after a compact and speedy portable SSD, this is definitely one to keep an eye out for.
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