Transcend ESD200 external USB 3.0 SSD

Review: Transcend ESD200 external USB 3.0 SSD

by Tarinder Sandhu on 12 April 2013, 09:00 4.0

Final thoughts and rating

Transcend's ESD200 is a good example of how much speed can be fitted into a package that's smaller than a modern mobile phone and truly pocketable as a result.

The speed of external storage is now beginning to resemble that offered by internal drives. Helped by fast conduits such as USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt, together with drives that can comfortably sustain 100MB/s read and writes, there's never been a better time in which to invest in plentiful storage.

Aiming at the premium end of the market, Transcend's ESD200 is a good example of how much speed can be fitted into a package that's smaller than a modern mobile phone and truly pocketable as a result. The 256GB model, priced at £200, is remarkably handy if you need to move huge files on a regular basis.

Looking towards a second-generation model, we'd encourage Transcend to polish the backup software and pre-install it on the drive, but that's our list of gripes done and dusted.

The Good

Genuinely pocketable drive
100MB/s-plus performance
Ideal for Windows To Go

The Bad

Additional software should be pre-installed

HEXUS rating

Transcend ESD200 256GB

HEXUS Awards

Transcend ESD200 256GB

HEXUS Where2Buy

The Transcend ESD200 256GB drive can be purchased from Amazon.co.uk.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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Portable hard drives never seem to last as long as internals - likely due to physical shocks, so SSD with its lack of moving part is a winner there.

I cringe when I see users literally drop (or throw !) portable HDDs into their bags.

SSD capacity just isn't enough to cover typical usage as a backup device. Manufacturers not using robust circuit board designs combined with the cable connectors often being a weak point mean that external SSD will fail too. Often you can pull the HDD from a failing external enclosure and drop it in a drive dock to discover the HDD is still good. QA on the drives > QA on the enclosures.