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Comparison Products
We’re not going easy on the Transcend 260S. We’re putting it up against the very best drives we’ve tested, including the SanDisk WD Black SN8100, the Samsung 9100 Pro, the Crucial T710, and the Corsair MP700 Pro XT. The first two are proprietary designs, while the latter two use the best controller from Silicon Motion and Phison, respectively. Using the same controller as the T710, but with Kioxia BiCS8 TLC flash, instead of Micron’s 276-Layer TLC, is the Kingston Fury Renegade G5. If we take this controller and drop in older, 232-Layer flash, we have the Lexar NM1090 Pro, which has the same hardware as the 260S but potentially different optimizations.
To round things out, we have lesser PCIe 5.0 drives with the high-end but DRAM-less Biwin Black Opal X570 and mid-range DRAM-less Kioxia Exceria Plus G4. This is skipping the earlier Phison E26-based drives – the hot-running, early adopter models – because we generally recommend avoiding them at this time. This puts more pressure on the 260S to perform.
Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark
Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.
The Transcend 260S finishes in the middle of the pack in 3DMark. Its performance is more than good enough for gaming, approaching drives like the 9100 Pro. Something with the same controller and BiCS8 TLC – flash found on the Black SN8100, MP700 Pro XT, or Fury Renegade G5 – will potentially be more responsive if you’re looking for the very fastest drive. The 260S will provide an excellent experience regardless and should feel good against HDDs, SATA SSDs, and even PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs.
Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark
PCMark 10 is an industry standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.
The drive also falls into the middle of the pack in PCMark 10. This is adequate performance for all but the heaviest of tasks. This drive is up against the fastest ones on the planet, and we feel that getting close to the T710 here – a drive that Crucial dialed in to be its flagship – is a win. If you’re serious about PCIe 5.0 performance, you will be running multiple high-end drives, and in that case, the 260H is sufficient for your second or third.
Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers
The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.
Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.
Would this drive make an excellent PS5 SSD? Yes. It’s overkill, though, and we would not recommend it. However, if you were to use it for that purpose – even only temporarily – the included graphene label is probably sufficient to cool the drive in the console.
Transfer Rates — DiskBench
We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.
Disk copy performance is acceptable with excellent read and write performance. It’s right in the mix with all of the other drives for the latter two, which means it’s great as your second or third drive for slinging files. Copy performance – reading and writing files to itself – is slower due to the flash being used. While this is relevant, you’re less likely to engage in such I/O operations unless it’s the only drive in your system.
Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark
ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.
The 260S has pretty solid results in ATTO and, more importantly, it doesn’t have the same drops we saw in the NM1090 Pro. These two drives use the same hardware, so we can assume Transcend has made sure to nail down its firmware. The result is better CDM sequential read performance at QD1, too, which is a good improvement. Low-QD reads are a common consumer workload, so every bit helps. Yes, the drives with better flash still perform better, but the 260S is the best of the “lower tier” drives.
Random performance is also very good, particularly for 4KB QD1 writes. For 4KB QD1 reads, which are often held as being the all-important workload for system responsiveness, it’s more average. It still lines up with good drives like the 9100 Pro and similar client drives that lean towards reliability like the Exceria Plus G4. It’s certainly not the fastest drive around, but it’s going to outdo any slower PCIe 5.0 drive and any PCIe 4.0 drive, as well.
Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery
Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.
We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states, including the steady state write performance.
Most modern consumer SSDs have three “modes” in which they will write data. The first is the cache mode, where it writes to single-bit pSLC flash to get the highest performance possible. For the 260S, this is at 12.65 GB/s for over 31s with a cache of around 400GB. Because the drive is converting its three-bit TLC flash to single-bit pSLC, the maximum cache size for the 2TB model is on the order of ~700GB. So the 260S’s cache, while large, could be larger. The advantage of a smaller cache is that you will have faster, more consistent writes with a depleted cache, a situation which can happen with longer writes and/or with a fuller drive.
The second mode is when the drive writes to its native flash, TLC in this case. For the 260S, this is at over 3.7 GB/s, which is very fast but about what we would expect for Micron’s 232-Layer TLC. This is a good result, and the drive is very consistent here. We would expect that, especially from a Transcend drive that is seeking reliable performance. While the flash can write faster, the drive is also trying to free up space by emptying and converting pSLC in the background. The drive does prioritize incoming writes, but if you write long enough, you will out-run its ability to do that.
That leads to the third mode, or folding, where the drive must wait for data to move out of the pSLC cache before it can handle more incoming data. This is where QLC-based drives, in particular, can be horrid. The 260S manages this quite well at 1.73 GB/s, which by most rights is pretty good. Don’t be deceived by the high steady state numbers other drives can achieve, but rather look at the whole picture. The 260S is very consistent and competently fast in all three modes, which is better than a faster drive that lacks consistency. It’s also a design choice not to be too fast for these writes because you want to maintain flash endurance – or rather, reduce unnecessary wear – and you also don’t want the drive to die prematurely from being pushed too hard in unfavorable environments. That choice will make more sense when taking in the details of the next section.
Power Consumption and Temperature
We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features so we show the worst-case for idle.
Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.
For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.
The 260S is decently power-efficient. It beats the 9100 Pro and the NM1090 Pro, the latter having the same hardware. This is important to point out because it reinforces our hypothesis that Transcend has honed this firmware. While it’s not as efficient as drives with newer flash, it’s better than pretty much any PCIe 3.0 or PCIe 4.0 drive. Its ability to be consistent with sustained workloads, combined with the graphene label for improved thermal flow, means that this drive is suitable for use in laptops.
Often, OEM drives will have stricter thermal limits, and if we look at SMART, we see that this drive starts to throttle at 83°C. This isn’t low, but it isn’t high, either. Is this worthy of concern? In our testing, not really. The drive topped out at 59°C, which is almost 25°C below the initial throttling point. We consider 20°C to be enough headroom in most cases. So while the 260S is not the fastest drive around, it is very consistent and should be very reliable even against drives that have the same hardware. While heat isn’t a top drive killer per se, generally speaking, it’s better to have a drive like the 260S, which is designed to be functional in a wider range of environments. This is an important consideration if you’re buying a drive and have reliability concerns in the back of your mind.
Test Bench and Testing Notes
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Graphics | Intel Iris Xe UHD Graphics 770 |
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We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.
Transcend 260S Bottom Line
The Transcend 260S is actually a really good drive, but we can’t give it a higher score when it only performs in the middle of its drive class. However, we do think it punches above this score for certain use cases. If you’re someone who values reliability and consistency more than performance, the 260S is among the best drives out there today. Transcend has a long history of designing OEM memory products, and this means it has a lot of experience with making reliable drives. No-name brands are more likely to use questionable hardware and have poor support. So while the hardware on the 260S is nothing to write home about, you can safely put this drive in any machine with a reasonable expectation of success.
We still recommend drives like the Black SN8100 and Samsung 9100 Pro if you want the reliability that comes with proprietary or semi-proprietary designs and top-tier performance. The Black SN8100 does not use a SanDisk controller, but the firmware on its SM2508 is definitely custom, and WD has a relationship with the BiCS8 flash. Transcend is closer to that type of design, as our results show it has some custom input, making it align more closely with Kioxia’s Exceria drives. In our experience, such drives are more reliable than generic off-brands. This is because they are held to a certain standard for OEM environments and, while this often means narrower thermal and performance envelopes, the drives usually operate more consistently as well. The 260S’s cache design reflects this intent.
This doesn’t mean we recommend it over drives like the MP700 Pro XT or Fury Renegade G5, either. Trusted brands with the newest hardware are going to give you an excellent experience. However, availability and pricing are big issues right now for SSDs. If you’re already willing to settle for a high-end drive that’s a step or half-step down – this would be E26-based drives and drives with older flash, like the 260S or NM1090 Pro – then the 260S should be near the top of your list. You’re compromising a bit on performance, but there’s no reason to compromise in other areas like power efficiency – that would be with the E26 drives – or with DRAM – that would be drives like the Black Opal X570. The 260S’s performance is solid enough to make a great high-end PCIe 5.0 drive and an alternative to these, so grab it if you see it.
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