Although most storage firms are moving towards higher SSD capacities, chopping even 128GB flavours from their line-ups, Transcend is clearly still keen to cater for those users who absolutely don’t care about huge amounts of flash memory storage. Accordingly, the SATA-based MTS800 M.2 series is available in five capacities, including just 32GB, a capacity that could only be useful in extremely cheap laptops.
It’s the 256GB and 512GB models that most interest us, though, as you then have enough room to install Windows, plenty of software and some games, with the latter occupying increasingly large capacities as games become ever more complex.
Transcends MTS800 drives use a Silicon Motion SM2246EN SATA controller branded as a Transcend TS6500, as used in the firm’s 2.5in drives. Likewise, Transcend also uses third-party flash memory – in this case, 20nm Micron 2-bit MLC. The chips are placed on both sides of the 2280 M.2 card, a break from what seems to be the norm for M.2 SSDs, with most manufacturers instead opting for singlesided placement. After overprovisioning, you’re left with 238GB of formatted space with the 256GB model, and 477GB with the 512GB model.
There are a few other features worth mentioning. There’s full-drive encryption and an additional circuit for data protection in the event of power loss, but the SSD Scope software has one feature sorely missing from the efforts of other manufacturers – system cloning, so you can back up your operating system from an existing hard disk onto the MTS800. If other manufacturers offer this feature, they usually do so by bundling third-party software in the box, usually from Acronis.
As an entry-level SATA M.2 drive, the MTS800 is competing on price with the likes of the Samsung 850 Evo M.2 and Crucial MX200 M.2, but these drives are both notably cheaper than the equivalent MTS800 models.
Unfortunately, this extra premium doesn’t translate into better performance, though, and in some cases, the very opposite. In a few of the synthetic tests, the MTS800 is at the bottom of the pile, or near to it, with only Kingston’s SSDNow M.2 achieving consistently lower results.
Although the sequential read speeds look okay at first glance, the MTS800 drives’ 32-queue-depth write speed languishes behind other drives.
Meanwhile, the mixed workloads Iometer test yielded an IOPS result of just 40,000 for both capacities on test – one of the lowest results we recorded this month. The 256GB model also comes bottom in some tests, including the Microsoft Word and Photoshop Heavy sections of PCMark 8.
There’s no reason a SATA-based SSD that uses the M.2 form factor will perform any better than a 2.5in SATA drive, of course, but you’d at least expect it to outperform decent 2.5in drives. Sadly, though, some of the MTS800 results sit well below what we’d expect from decent 2.5in drives.
The 32-queue-depth sequential write result of 318MB/sec, for example, is well behind the competition.
While it’s far from a terrible drive, the Transcend MTS800 is eclipsed by competing M.2 SSDs, whether SATA-based or PCI-E, particularly Samsung’s 850 Evo or Crucial’s MX200. If you want to avoid the significant premium for increased PCI-E performance by opting for a SATA drive, or if you want the wide compatibility of a SATA drive, both the aforementioned Crucial and Samsung drives offer faster speeds than the Transcend MTS800, and for less money too.
VERDICT
Tempting prices for the capacities on offer, but the competition from Samsung and Crucial eclipses the MTS800 in terms of both performance and value for money.