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

Portable Flash Storage

The Transcend ESD200 Portable SSD is a portable external hard drive unlike any other. While most manufacturers are content to fit 5400rpm mechanical hard disks into their portable external hard drives, the Transcend drive has gone for broke with their ESD200 portable external hard disk and have instead equipped it with a 1.8-inch form factor SSD.



As you might know, SSDs are significantly faster than traditional mechanical hard disks. And as we have demonstrated in our review of one of the fastest mechanical hard disks currently available, the VelociRaptor from Western Digital, it was no match for even mainstream SSDs.

With this in mind, it is not surprising to see that Transcend, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of flash memory products, have fitted their ESD200 portable external hard drive with an SSD. In theory, the SSD should be much faster than the mechanical hard disks that most other manufacturers put in their portable external hard drives, but then there’s the question of its USB 3.0 interface.



To be certain, USB 3.0 offers substantially more bandwidth that its USB 2.0 predecessor - 5Gbps vs. 480MBps - and we have no doubts that the Transcend ESD200 portable SSD will be faster than typical portable external hard disks with mechanical drives, but how fast will it be? And will the Transcend ESD200’s USB 3.0 interface hamper its performance? These are the questions that we hope to address in our review. But first, let's have a closer look at the drive.

Design & Features

The Transcend ESD200 portable SSD is extremely compact and will fit into pockets easily. In practical terms, it is about the size of a name-card holder and is considerably smaller than 2.5-inch portable external hard drives. It achieves its small size thanks to the use of a 1.8-inch form factor drive within.

In terms of design, the ESD200 drive has a black glossy plastic front panel with diamond motifs and a plain plastic casing on all sides. On the front panel there’s also an LED indicator that lights up blue if connected to a USB 3.0 port and green if connected to a USB 2.0 port. This is a useful indicator to show users if they are fully maximizing the capabilities of the drive. Considering it has an SSD inside instead of a typical mechanical hard disk, using USB 3.0 whenever possible is highly recommended.

The Transcend ESD200 also has a special button that enables what Transcend calls "One Touch Auto-Backup" using their own Transcend Elite backup software. Press it, and the drive will automatically perform backup tasks. Speaking of which, the Transcend Elite backup software is a powerful one with lots of features and offers a high level of customization. It can schedule backups and users can even specify which folders and files that they want backed up. The utility can also encrypt data and create restore points. Unfortunately, the software is cumbersome to use and not the most user-friendly. In addition, the button that enables "One Touch Auto-Backup" will work only if the Transcend Elite software is running, that's not a problem if the application runs in the background, but it does not and this can be annoying to users who often use Alt-Tab to switch between applications.

Test Setup

To evaluate the Transcend ESD200 portable SSD, we will be using the same benchmarks as we did in our Great 1TB USB 3.0 Portable HDD Shootout. However, the tests will be conducted on our new storage testbed which has the following specifications:

• Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz)
• ASUS P8Z77-V Thunderbolt (Intel Z77 chipset)
• 2 x 2GB DDR3-1600 memory
• MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
• Windows 7 64-bit

The list of drives tested:

• Transcend ESD200 Portable SSD
• Kingston HyperX Max 3.0
• Seagate Backup Plus
• Imation Apollo Expert M300

We will be pitting the Transcend ESD200 portable SSD against two of the quickest 2.5-inch portable hard drives that we have tested so far - the Seagate Backup Plus and Imation Apollo Expert M300. We have also included results from the Kingston HyperMax 3.0 portable external drive. Like the Transcend ESD200, the Kingston HyperMax 3.0 is a portable external hard drive with a SSD inside. This is a pretty old model and therefore only has 64GB of storage, however it too uses an USB 3.0 interface so it would be a good point of reference for the Transcend ESD200.



List of benchmarks tested:

• CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1
• PCMark 7 (Secondary Storage Suite)
• HD Tune Pro 5.0
• File Transfer Timing Test

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 Results

Looking at the CrystalDiskMark, we can see that the Transcend ESD200 is faster in all respects than the Seagate Backup Plus and Imation Apollo Expert M300. Both sequential read and write speeds were significantly faster as were its speeds at handling smaller data blocks of 512K and 4K. In fact, on the most intensive 4k, queue depth 32 workload, while the Seagate and Imation drives could only muster a maximum speed of around 1 MB/s, the Transcend ESD200 recorded 20 and 14 MB/s on both read and write operations respectively.

Compared to the older Kingston HyperX Max 3.0, read performance was generally pretty comparable, but the Kingston had noticeably better write performance - sequential write speeds and write speeds on the 4k and 4k, 32 queue depth workloads were significantly better.

HD Tune Pro 5.0 Results

The Transcend ESD200 continued its strong showing on HD Tune Pro 5.0. Its average sequential read speed was easily double that of both the Seagate and Imation drive; while its average sequential write speed, though less impressive, was still easily 80% more than the Seagate and Imation drives.

However, where it really shined was on the random access performance workloads, where its random IOPs numbers were easily leaps and bounds ahead of the two portable external hard drives with mechanical hard disks. This is just as we had expected because SSDs generally have much lower seek times.

The Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 could not complete the write operations because of an odd anomaly, but generally, read performance was pretty similar to the Transcend ESD200, save for the slightly better random read access performance. In terms of raw speed, the Kingston's random access read speeds were about 18% faster. 

PCMark 7 Results

In further performance analysis with PCMark 7, the benchmarking suite from FutureMark, this helps us evaluate the performance of Windows 7 machines. It tests a wide range workloads and aspects of the system ranging from computation, image and video manipulation and storage. We’ll be looking solely at the storage test here.

The Transcend ESD200 lost out slightly to the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0, but the difference wasn't much, just 220 PCMarks or just 4%. Not surprisingly, the Transcend ESD200 handily beat both the Seagate and Imation drives, recording 4101 PCMarks, a staggering 275% more than what the two portable external hard drives with mechanical drives could achieve.

File Transfer Timing Test

Since such portable hard drives would be mostly frequently used for transferring large media files, we rounded off our testing with a real world file transfer timing test. In this test, we measured how long it took to copy a 1.72GB movie file.

Transferring a large file is a test of sequential performance speeds and as such the Transcend ESD200 was not able to eke out a significant advantage with its fast random access performance. Although the Transcend ESD200 was the fastest drive, it was only half a second quicker than the Seagate Backup Plus. The Imation Apollo Expert M300 was slightly slower at 29 seconds. The Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 managed 27.8 seconds, which is a second slower than the Transcend ESD200.

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.

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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