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Transcend ESD350C USB C Portable SSD Review: Tough and Pocket Sized Too!

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As a reviewer or even as a consumer myself, the hunt for external storages are real. When I start curating content and editing video, the need to export and moving it around is pretty important. This is where, SSDs come to play. I jump between two different laptops &ndash; one at Home and on the go every time and sometimes copying data takes a lot of time. So, Transcend reached out and sent us their ESD350C SSD for us to take a closer look and review it &ndash; Here&rsquo;s our final verdict on it.
Design and Build Quality


The Transcend ESD350C is literally a petite SSD that comes in a dimension that fits in the palm of your hands. It follows a similar design to one of their bigger HDD that looks the same &ndash; the StoreJet 25MC. It has a rubber sleeve on the outside and if you remove it, you can access the 4 little screws inside to open it up &ndash; which we won&rsquo;t recommend because there&rsquo;s a Warranty Sticker on the side. Other than that, it has a sleek shape and on the side, we have one port &ndash; a USB-C 3.1 Gen 2.


As for the Build Quality, the ESD350C is built with protection &ndash; the rubber sleeve on the outside isn&rsquo;t just for looks. The silicone rubber case has the capability to offer rugged protection and it&rsquo;s shock-absorbing capability can keep their hard drive safe. Good thing is that, it&rsquo;s US Military drop-test certified.

Let&rsquo;s talk more about the SSD. The SSD boasts a USB-C Port on the side, which is a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port that supports UASP and on paper, has the capability to transfer at speeds up-to 1050MB/s. The storage inside the rugged shell is a 3D NAND Flash based storage. To give a crash course on 3D NAND &ndash; it&rsquo;s a storage memory where the cells are stacked vertically in multiple layers and NAND technology is known to achieve higher densities at lower cost per bit. This should also give you a boost in application performance and lower latency compared to a conventional HDD in general.

The ESD350C comes in 4 different capacity: 240GB, 480GB and 960GB respectively. Inside the box, they have included a USB Type A to C and C to C cable, which is pretty cool &ndash; so you don&rsquo;t have to worry about connecting to multiple devices.
Storage and Performance

Transcend sent us the 480GB variant of the Transcend ESD350C and we did the following test. To benchmark the SSD, we used CrystalDiskMark and ATTO Benchmark to see what kind of performance we can get from this SSD and on top of that, we used both the USB-C and USB-A Cables included in the box to see if there&rsquo;s any variation in speed. Let&rsquo;s get down to the benchmark.
We tested the SSD with ASUS ROG Strix Scar GL703 and as for benchmarking the SSD, we used CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 and ATTO Diskbench.
Test 1: USB-C to C

Test 2: USB-A to C

In the test above, you can see that the USB C to C has a better Read and Write compared to USB-A to C where it&rsquo;s half the score. In today&rsquo;s world of storage, speed of a storage is bottlenecked by the port that we connect on our PC/Laptop and in this case, it clearly proves the point &ndash; that full size USB Ports has limitations to it when it comes to transferring data whereas using a USB-C Standard port can give you speeds as close as what Transcend claims, which is definitely the case here. To prove this theory, we transferred 5GB worth of files from our desktop over to the SSD with both the port and you can see the difference below.
USB A to C

USB C to C

In the first test, we used USB-A to C and you can see the peak speed it can write will be at 101MB/s and it takes about 2 minutes to transfer data that&rsquo;s about 5GB. In the second test, you can clearly see that the peak speed is at 472MB/s and it dropped to 110MB/s and it took less than 10 seconds to move the data. In our case, we can confidently say that the speed varies according to the type of cable you use. So, if you want better speeds, make sure to utilize the USB-C port on your PC/Laptop &ndash; it helps, a lot.
The Transcend ESD350C has the capability to transfer data extremely fast and you can catch your last train or what ever transport you are taking in no time.

The Transcend ESD350C is without a doubt one nice SSD to pick up from the store because compared with other options out there in the market, the ESD350C comes in a price tag that&rsquo;s pretty affordable and gets your work going. The ESD350C comes in three different variant and it&rsquo;s priced as follows: 240GB &ndash; RM 409, 480GB &ndash; RM 559 and 960GB &ndash; RM 819.