If I hadn't spotted the small difference in the part number on a reseller's site, we wouldn't even know about the difference. One drive is brushed aluminum, and the other is black plastic. Given the questionable flash used in the larger models and no guarantee of getting genuine Micron flash, the others can stay there as well.īefore I conclude, I would like to make a note about the different models. The smaller products should be limited to embedded use. Given the price and limited use, we couldn't recommend the two smallest capacities for anything remotely like what our readers use storage for. The Transcend SSD370 scales a wide range of capacity sizes, from 32GB to 1TB. All of the people I spoke with said digital signage was an appropriate application. I pressed further to ask if this flash would be viable for other uses, like digital signage, where most of the data is read and very little write activities take place. One engineer even said he would never use it in his own computer system. None said they would use any SpecTek flash in a retail product designed for client use.
We reached out to a few SSD product managers and engineers without telling them the circumstances of our questioning. The -AL in the model number correlates to SpecTek's highest-quality flash, per a document we found on the company's website. That doesn't mean the SpecTek flash isn't SSD grade. If that is the case, then why do reviewers get the premium parts 99 percent of the time, and end users get the slower or less-reliable parts? Every time, we've heard the same excuse: The build of materials is not guaranteed, and end users will not notice the difference. I've broken several stories about it in the past, from synchronous to asynchronous flash and SiliconMotion controllers to older SandForce controllers. It has become common for companies to change the build of materials on NAND flash, and even do a complete controller swap. It's funny how that works: Reviewers get the good stuff, but customers get whatever is obtainable at the time. This is the first time a company sent a client SSD to me with this flash for review, but we do know that other companies have shipped it in other retail drives. The 256GB drive we received did arrive with genuine Micron flash, but the 512GB model contained less-desirable SpecTek flash. Now let's move on to the flash, where premium could only mean Tier 1 Grade A NAND from reputable SSD manufacturers.