Transcend MTS430S 256GB M.2 2242 SATA III 6Gb/s SSD, Read/Write up to 530/400 MB/s with DRAM Cache for Ultrabooks& Lightweight Notebooks TS256GMTS430S

I've been using this in an Asus CN62 Chromebox running Windows 10. This is one of the few M.2 2242 SATA SSDs available (most are the superior NVMe type) and none of the big brands (Samsung, Crucial, etc) make them. So far (3 months in) it's been working very well, with typical fast SSD performance, although the machine isn't doing anything too taxing. If you need a SATA M.2 42mm drive, this is a great choice, from a reputable brand. Update: This has been running for over a year and a half now. It is in a low usage machine but is on 24/7. The drive was running very hot (60-70 C), but this is within the manufacturers limits (75 C) and it has had no ill effects yet. I purchased a small metal heatsink on ebay a few months ago, and with this fitted it's running at 50-58 C. Update (2023): This has just been semi-retired as I've replaced the system it was in with a newer one. The drive has been running at 50-70C for 4 years and has 37,615 hours of uptime. Crystal disk info reports health at 98% due to 5.3 TB reads and 7.6 TB writes (3.8 TB NAND writes) with all erase/error counts at 100% health. Would definitely buy Transcend again, this has outlasted some Crucials and Samsungs for me!

straight replacement, does exactly what it should.

This increased disk space from 32GB to 256GB. Also faster access. Made an old linux laptop really useful. Using ubuntu installation usb stick, copied old ssd to a file with dd, and then back to the new disk with dd. Ran granted to check the copied partition and it said it could fix the reported disk size to the new size. I let it. Then I just booted up into the new ssd. Done. Great. Really pleased. Great zoom machine.

Easily installed and picked up by NUC running proxmox.

This is what I expected. The quality is excellent, delivery is on time and good.

SSD is good and performs well, I can confirm the numbers about speed on the pictures from other reviews.

Bought this to replace a 32Gb SSD on a Dell Inspiron micro pc that failed after 3 years. Slotted it in, recognised straight away, restored Windows and all is good. An easy plug and play job and it's working just fine. If thinking about buying an SSD just make sure it's the right size: there are several different lengths.... Think this is the latest version of this drive: see the Transcend website for further information on current products.

I type this up from my ThinkPad T470 running Windows 10 ten off this very Transcend 256GB 430S SSD. As of 7/7/20, the T470 is running the latest UEFI available for it (1.63) (the RAID ROM inside it is version 15 something), with the Intel 17.8.11.1080 AHCI driver. As of 7/7/20, my 430S does not have any newer firmware available for it (as per Transcend's SSD Scope program) than what it came with: R0906A. Installation was easy on this laptop: place the SSD into the WWAN slot, screw it in and power up the laptop. It was detected fine by my Windows install on the main SATA SSD, no problems there. There is actually a knowledge base article on the Transcend site about the dangers of installing the SSD the wrong way around; you may cause the SSD to overheat tremendously, leading to the obvious result. Thankfully on this laptop, you can only insert it label-side up. Installing Windows onto it was fine. No problems there. The speed is fine to me too. Sorry, there's no CrystalDiskMark screenies from me: I'm a simple person and my metric for judging its speed is “does my Web browser start in an acceptable time?”. My answer to that is for me, yes, it's fine. Even with Defender running, this SSD doesn't feel slow at reading things. There are two points of concern for me, however. As noted in other reviews, the temperature of this SSD is quite high. For me, the usual operating temperature is 40 or something between 45-51. If I'm lucky, after an hour of idling with absolutely nothing open, the drive may report a temperature back of 35 deg. Celsius. Highest I've seen is 60(!) when copying a 3 GB file to it. Those numbers are what I get after doing the (probably not-so-effective) following to try and mitigate the issue: * Inside the laptop, the card is not screwed in fully to keep it from touching the surface so the bottom of it gets a bit of airflow. There are chips on both sides of the card. My laptop also has a little plastic flap to keep the WWAN card covered, which I've left off this SSD. * I strongly suspect this is placebo, but I have smartmontools set the SSD's AAM level to 128 and turn off the write cache. The other issue I have is that on my laptop if the SSD goes to sleep, it will not wake up. I can move my mouse pointer around, interact with running applications but nothing will start and the SSD will not respond to requests to get its SMART data. Eventually Windows BSODs with CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED. I've had such BSODs when my laptop has been doing nothing while I sleep. I've also had 'em when I have been typing things up. (While my laptop may have been active, I imagine the SSD wasn't particularly so.) If I use hdparm/smartctl to manually initiate sleeping of the drive, it will not wake up again. I believe I have worked around this by: * Using smartmontools to disable standby * Unhiding the settings to control the hard disk sleep mode in Power Options and disabling both HIPM and DIPM modes and keeping the SSD continually active It's been seven hours as I type this and I've not had a BSOD yet. I can personally live with the drawbacks because I got this SSD for the sole reason to keep Windows on, an OS that I don't personally plan on booting into much.