Transcend 2.5" 64GB PATA MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) TS64GSSD25-M

Pros: Breathed new life into my old Sony VAIO laptop: 2.6GHz P4, 1GB RAM, 60GB 4200rpm (ugh), some kind of ATi video card. Old HDD topped out at ~25MB/s sustained read, new SSD tops out at ~70MB/s. Loads Photoshop 7.0 in <5 seconds.

Cons: Random-write speed isn't so hot, but doesn't stall the machine like some cheaper SSDs supposedly do. No built-in TRIM function to clear unused memory when idle, and doesn't appear to have upgradeable firmware, but I'm not 100% sure about this.

Overall Review: TWEAKS YOU NEED TO MAKE (look them up online): - Disable write-caching. - Disable prefetching. - Set memory usage to favor system cache. - Disable background defragmentation. - Set pagefile to fixed size (I recommend 1GB). - Disable hard disk power management. One of the inherent downfalls with MLC-based SSDs is that it takes longer to read/write each slot in memory because each slot holds two bits instead of one, but MLC is also a lot cheaper so it's getting the most R&D to improve its performance. I wouldn't put this drive into a new computer, not least because a new computer could use SATA instead of IDE, but for an old machine (especially an old machine with a slow 4200rpm or 5400rpm hard drive), it's a significant improvement even though it bogs down when writing lots of small files. Would buy again.

Pros: This thing is snappy! I bought it to replace a dead 5400 RPM drive for an aging tablet and it was very much worth it! Boot times are between 15 and 30 seconds faster, menu icons/folder listings are almost instantaneous. Random-access stuff is ridiculously fast for IDE. Benchmarked with 16 GB test files using dd: 75-80 MB/s reads, 30-50 mb/s writes. My old drive must have been a power hog too, as I get another 15-20 minutes of battery life out of it with no other changes. The whole tablet is noticeably lighter, and I feel a lot less worried about bumping it around without that hard drive in it. +High speed +low power consumption +(Slightly) lighter than a HDD

Cons: This isn't exactly a huge amount of space, but it's SSD, what do you expect? IDE's getting phased out. I wouldn't bother spending this much money on something that can be upgraded to SATA. To be fair, none of these cons are directly attributable to faults of the drive itself, just the interface and technology. -Expensive -Low size

Overall Review: The high price and old interface limit it to applications where it's infeasible to upgrade to SATA. In those applications though, the speed increase and power savings far outweigh the costs.

Pros: The only PATA SSD that I could find. Lower power consumption with a noticeable increase in read performance over a 5400 RPM mechanical drive. Less vulnerable to damage from physical abuse.

Cons: If you buy this unit expecting a blazingly fast drop-in-replacement for a mechanical hard drive, especially running WinXP you are likely to be disappointed. The improved read performance is balanced by a write performance below that of the average HD, and frequent controller stalls freezing WinXP during heavy write activity will be annoying. If you don't know how to align a disk partition, edit the registry, disable hibernation, are uncomfortable extensively tweaking WinXP, or if your computer has less than 1 gigabyte of RAM (to minimize page file writes!), I would avoid this unit and get a mechanical hard drive.

Overall Review: Do your homework BEFORE trying to install - correct partition alignment is a MUST for even marginally acceptable performance. Moving temp files onto a RAM disk helps, but is impractical on machines with smaller RAM sizes. For an older laptop, think long and hard about the tradeoffs of simply replacing your old machine with one of the newest crop of low-cost netbooks. It'll likely only cost a couple hundred dollars more, and could save you a LOT of grief.

Pros: fast read rate, lightweight, simple setup.

Cons: not enough online material for mac installation

Overall Review: This is the second time I try the ssd on powerbook g4 titanium dvi. The harddisk originally is 4200rpm and has no pin to indicate whether it is master or slave. without pin on the original HD, I thought it was in slave mode. With SSD in slave mode, it has issue from sleep and detection(cannot get into firewire mode from boot), but once with the pin setting the slave into master mode, it is all good. It appear the default apple HD has some special formware in it, and I did not find any info on putting the Transcend SSD into the powerbook. Notice the system profiler will give unit ID as 0 for the default disk, if you set the SSD in slave mode, it will read unit: 1 instead of 0. Make sure the HD is set in master mode and it should work fine. No awake from sleep trouble, very fast, a 3X increase in xbench HD score.

Pros: Very fast disk-- it's a nice speed boost for an aging MSI MEGABOOK S260 Pentium M laptop. Actually, the machine feels more like a recent machine with this update. We use SSDs on some of our machines at work, but those machines are already so fast that the speed difference is hard to notice, but with this old laptop (running Windows and Ubuntu), the difference is very clear. My first impression is good.

Cons: Could be cheaper.

Overall Review: I know that PATA is going out of style, but it's exactly in machines with this interface where these kinds of disks will make a big difference. Hopefully PATA SSDs will be around for awhile longer.

Pros: Easy to install. Plug in right into my old Sony notebook PCG505BX. It works like a charm. It revitalizes my old laptop. With windows7, my old battery can work longer. It takes less than 30sec to bootup (versus more than 2 mins with my old 4200rpm harddisk in WinXP). Love it so far.

Cons: Little bit slow in installing programs.

Overall Review: If the price drops more, I will get another for my desktop.

Pros: Pretty fast and cheap SSD for use as "storage".

Cons: none

Overall Review: I usually am pretty good about researching stuff b4 I buy it, but I did not find out some important info regarding SSD's untill a few min ago. If you want ot use a SSD as a primary OS drive you need a SLC and not and MLC like this one :( Look on Anandtech for "Enter the Poorly Designed MLC". I hope NewEgg will take this back :(

Pros: Drive is still working fine one year later.

Cons: None yet.

Overall Review: I know this might not be conforming to the review guidelines, but you guys really should know about this: there is a free utility I've been using on my Transcend PATA SSD that's made a world of difference: "Flashfire is a utility that uses host RAM to enhance random write performance of a SSD. It's especially useful for the system using low-end SSDs". I've been using it for almost a year now, and it's indispensable.