14 DAY TRIAL // Transcend may be primarily focused on industrial-grade products and technologies, but sometimes it releases things for consumer-oriented devices, like laptops, tablets, etc. The latest two SSDs to leave its labs qualify for the latter.
In fact, the newcomers are even better and are more appropriate for mobile devices than normal solid state drives, because of their form factors.
After all, while a 2.5-inch SSD might be good enough for a laptop or even an Ultrabook, it won't fit in tablets or phones, or portable gaming systems.
And while smartphones do usually employ memory cards instead of SSDs, the others do better with actual solid-state drives.
So here we are, faced with the SATA III 6 Gb/s N8S750 M.2 and MSA340 mSATA solid-state drives.
The M.2 form factor is the smallest, or at least the narrowest, with a smaller interface than mSATA, but the latter is going to score more design wins, probably. At least among ultrabooks, notebooks and tablets.
The MSA340 mSATA drive is, in fact, 78% smaller than a standard 2.5-inch drive, measuring 50.8 mm x 29.85 mm x 4.0 mm / 2 x 1.17 x 0.15 inches.
That said, it should work just fine in things besides mobile devices (hand-held scanners, navigation systems, e-book readers, etc.), like slim servers and set-top boxes.
As for performance, the SATA 6.0 Gbps interface allows reads to be done at 520 MB/s and writes at 280 MB/s. A truly big difference, larger even than the one on the M.2.
Speaking of which, the N8S750 SSD, despite its space-saving 80 mm M.2 form factor (80.0 mm x 22.0 mm x 3.5 mm / 3.14 x 0.86 x 0.13 inches) is faster, at 520 MB/s and 330 MB/s, respectively. It performs that well thanks to DDR3 DRAM cache.
Both SSDs support SATA Device sleep mode (DevSleep) and Intel Smart Response Technology (ISRT, for acting as cache drives in combo with a much higher-capacity HDD). Both feature built-in ECC and wear leveling, intelligent block management, and support for enhanced S.M.A.R.T. Commands.
The SATA III 6 Gb/s N8S750 M.2 SSD comes in 32 GB to 128 GB capacities, while the SATA III 6 Gb/s MSA340 mSATA SSD ships in 32 GB to 256 GB.
For those unfamiliar with the term, DevSleep lets compatible mobile devices shut off the SATA interface completely, while still maintaining a fast response of under 100 ms, for instant-on capabilities at no power loss.