Product Listing

Transcend ESD200 Portable SSD (256GB) - Flash in Your Pocket

By Kenny Yeo - 10 Apr 2013
Launch SRP: S$408

Conclusion

Premium Justified?

As our test results clearly show, the Transcend ESD200 portable SSD is a significantly faster drive than your "traditional" 2.5-inch portable hard drives with mechanical hard disks. The Transcend ESD200 trumps these drives in all aspects, but where it really shone was its very fast seek times, which is typical of SSDs. This observation was also confirmed by the results of the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 drive. Like the Transcend ESD200, this drive from Kingston also uses an SSD, and it too had very fast seek times, which allowed it and the Transcend ESD200 to both perform well on random access workloads.

On top of its quick performance, it is also very compact and portable thanks to the use of a 1.8-inch form factor drive. Of course, one would still need to bring along the USB 3.0 cable, but the drive itself weighs just a mere 56g and will slip into pockets easily. The only downers were the cumbersome bundled backup utility and also the rather superfluous one-touch backup button.

Unfortunately, while it is superior in every way to regular portable external hard drives, it is also costlier. The 256GB variant that we have here has a recommended retail price of a whopping S$408 - the 128GB variant goes for S$216. To put that number into perspective, the Seagate Backup Plus and Imation Apollo Expert M300 that we have for comparison both retail for under S$150. They may not be as compact or have the raw speed, but they do offer 1TB of storage, which is substantially more than what the ESD200 offers and at a fraction of the cost.

The Transcend ESD200 portable SSD delivers great performance in a compact form factor, but in return, it asks for a lot of your pennies.

Furthermore, at that price, the Transcend ESD200 costs more than just about any high-end 256GB SSD as well. Therefore, one could easily purchase a regular 2.5-inch form factor 256GB SSD, put it into a USB 3.0 hard disk enclosure, and you would get the same kind of performance as you would from the ESD200, but in a larger form factor.

The Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 has long been discontinued so its not a viable alternative to the Transcend ESD200. However, bear in mind that when it was first launched a few years ago, a comparable 256GB variant of that drive commanded a whopping US$599 (S$741) price tag! Bearing this mind, the Transcend ESD200 suddenly seems like a bargain, doesn't it?

In closing, the Transcend ESD200 portable SSD is a drive that delivers on its promises. Although we fully agree that top products can rightfully command a premium over its peers, S$408 is a very steep. If you need a speedy and ultra compact portable external hard disk and have deep enough pockets, the Transcend ESD200 ticks all the right boxes. Otherwise, know that there are other, albeit less quick and elegant, options.

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7.5
  • Design 8
  • Performance 8
  • Features 8
  • Value 6.5
The Good
Much faster than typical 2.5-inch portable external hard drives
Very compact
Bundled backup software has lots of features
The Bad
Very pricey
Gimmicky "One Touch Auto-Backup" button
Bundled backup software is clumsy and unintuitive
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