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Transcend 110S M.2 PCIe SSD review – This will do nicely

The easiest way to get the best performance from your PC is to get your components passing through as few bottle necks as possible.

Before SATA we used IDE and it was painfully slow and incredibly cumbersome for PC builders.

While SATA has served us well for a long time we’re seeing more and more components eyeing the PCIe slot, in particular solid state drives.

This makes sense because a PCIe slot is capable of massive throughput, more so than SATA was and it’s incredibly tempting for folks who want to operate at the bleeding edge of performance.

One application of PCIe drives is the M.2 slot which uses the aforementioned tech without eating up one of your valuable PCIe slots that could be used for a GPU, sound card or other bulky gear.

Today then we will be looking at the Transcend 110S M.2 SSD and whether its worth upgrading your SATA-bound SSD.

Transcend 110S M.2 PCIe SSD review – Performance

The 110S makes use of 3D NAND flash and it is fast.

Transcend rates this drive as capable of 1.8GB/s read speeds and 1.5GB/s write but there is a caveat.

In order to get those speeds you will need an M.2 slot that supports PCIe Gen3 x4 at the M.2 slot.

Should you have that particular PCIe support you will see speeds close to those advertised. Our testing saw us reaching an average read speed of 1748MB/s and average write speeds of 1301MB/s.

In real world experience games load incredibly quickly.

Overall this is a really good piece of kit for a desktop or notebook that supports M.2 expansion drives.

There’s also a wonderful utility called SSD Scope that you can download for free and it will give you an indication of the tech your motherboard supports.

The software will also tell you what the SSDs “wear out” currently sits at so that you know when something is about to go wrong. The SSD Scope also allows you to clone an existing hard drive or SSD which is great if you’re currently looking to upgrade or avoid a catastrophic failure.

This drive is also cheap, like so cheap I feel bad sharing the pricing.

The 128GB iteration of this SSD has a recommended retail price of R949, 256GB is R1 599 and the hefty 512GB will cost you R2 899.

Transcend 110S M.2 PCIe SSD review – Conclusion

We’re quickly reaching a point where bottlenecks are getting in the way of technology reaching its full potential and this SSD is showcasing that spectacularly.

Truth be told we weren’t expecting this drive to be bad. 3D NAND has been proven to be a great way to store data and with the removal of the SATA bottleneck we’re able to see speeds that show just how much of a difference a high bandwidth connection can have.

The product does what it says on the box and it does it well.

That having been said we urge you to make sure that your motherboard supports PCIe Gen 3 x4 on the M.2 slot so that you can full advantage of the 3D NAND in this drive.

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