Transcend Intros ESD320A Portable SSD, Comes in Capacities of up to 2 TB

[btarunr]

Transcend introduced the ESD320A portable SSD. This drive comes in a stick-type form-factor that closely resembles USB flash drives, but is slightly larger than them, measuring 68.2 mm x 19.7 mm x 9.5 mm (L x W x H), weighing 26 g. The drive features a slide-out USB 3.2 Gen 2 type-A connector. It takes advantage of the 10 Gbps interface bandwidth to provide transfer speeds of up to 1050 MB/s sequential reads, with up to 900 MB/s sequential writes. Internally, the drive uses a 3D NAND flash memory with SLC caching resembling modern internal SSDs. The drive uses UASP (USB-attached SCSI) to speed up high QD transfers. The Transcend ESD320A comes in three capacity variants—512 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB. Transcend includes the Elite Data Management utility that provides backup, restore, and encryption features. The company didn't reveal pricing, but mentioned that it backs these drives with 5-year warranties.



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[Bwaze]

It's ridiculous that most of the internal drives offered to the market are now the size of a USB thumb drive. What the hell happened?

 

[Chaitanya]

These have been available for purchase at multiple retailers for over 2 weeks now. 512GB is $70, 1TB for $110 and 2TB for $210.
Since someone here was sleeping, here is the link to B&H listing:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?q=esd320a&sts=ma

Transcend themselves have a variation of this drive in form of ESD330C with USB C interface, and Silicon Power also has similar drives with couple of variations of MS70.

 

[evernessince]

It's ridiculous that most of the internal drives offered to the market are now the size of a USB thumb drive. What the hell happened?

Multiple things can explain this:

1) M.2 is compatible with a wide range of devices from desktop, laptop, to consoles and portable handhelds.
2) There has been no replacement cable for SATA that would support physically larger drives. PCIe 4.0 and higher is hard to maintain signal over distances.
3) The cost of NAND is still very prohibative. 8TB TLC m.2 drivers are still $850 - $1,300. Meanwhile a 20TB HDD is $230. By extension there's not much of a demand for higher capacity drives because it would be cost prohibative for the vast majority of the market.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Guessing aliexpress listing appearing in 4-3-2... hehe