This is a follow-up to my previous thread https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1hytjia/transcend_ssd230s_4gb_teardown_and_cooling_upgrade/m6k5ifi/
There are just too many posts so I've decided to start a new thread.
TLDR of the old story: Transcend SATA SSD model 230S has faulty firmware and bad cooling desing which leads to severe throttling, complete drive hangs and SATA link resets, and buildup of reallocated sectors. Highly likely the core issue is the buggy firmware rather than a bad cooling, so if you have firmware older than 22Z4X4IA then you should update as soon as possible. WARNING: firmware update will wipe the drive so you will lose all your data, make a full backup prior to updating. Use the official Transcend software to make a bootable USB drive, if you will not succeed then you could try the extracted firmware updater (Linux only): https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1hytjia/transcend_ssd230s_4gb_teardown_and_cooling_upgrade/mysc64p/ If your warranty is expired already then you should also modify the cooling by connecting the chips with the aluminum drive casing with a thermal pads. If your warranty is still valid then you might try to RMA the drives, especially if you have many reallocated sectors.
And now about the new model: I have returned 4 out of 8 drives (the 4 modified drives are obviously not eligible for RMA) and Transcend have sent me a new drives for replacement. The old drives were manufactured in the summer 2023, the new drives are manufactured in the summer 2025, just 1 month ago. The old drives have serial numbers starting with letter H (H690......), the new drives have serial numbers starting with letter J (J455......).
There is one difference in the SMART: the old drives have attribute "Offline data collection status: (0x80)" Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. The new drives have it disabled: "Offline data collection status: (0x00)" Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled. Possibly this is a workaround of the bug in the firmware, you might want to disable it on your drives too.
There are no more differences in the SMART. Also there are no differences in the chips, the smi_flash_id tool by Vadim Ochkin ( http://vlo.name:3000/ssdtool/ ) report this:
Controller : SM2259AB
Bank00: 0x45,0x48,0x98,0x3,0x76,0x6c,0x0,0x0 - Sandisk 112L BiCS5 TLC 16k 1024Gb/CE 1024Gb/die 2Plane/die
...
DRAM Size,MB : 2*512
DRAM Vendor : Samsung
— SSD230S 4TB has just 1GB DRAM but it is still a TLC drive while other manufacturers have started to put QLC chips into their large capacity drives.
The old drives had a big hole between the SATA connector and the drive casing and you could see that the chips inside do not touch the aluminum casing: https://files.catbox.moe/ihgi89.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/ev1ptn.jpg
The new drives have a slightly modified casing with a different SATA connector which does not allow to see what's inside the case: https://files.catbox.moe/fi0x09.jpg but there are four small holes and if you shine a light into the left ones you will be able to see the chip through the right holes, the chip is still not connected to the aluminum casing: https://files.catbox.moe/6drot0.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/uwtktg.jpg
This makes me think that the source of the original problem was a bug in the firmware rather than a bad cooling, as Transcend still does not put thermal pads inside the SSD.
And a few comments: first of all I want to give a shout out to Transcend support team, the communication and RMA procedure was smooth and much better than I've experienced with some other brands, even "enterprise" ones (looking at you HPE)
As I've wrote in the previous thread,
Well, these drives are cheap for a reason, I guess no more Transcends for me too.
but then I've recalled that Samsung manufactured 870 Evo's using broken chips and shipped 990 Pro's with faulty firmware that was quickly killing the chips over time (same as Transcend SSD230S lol), that HP and Sandisk shipped their enterprise drives with a killswitch in the firmware that wiped the customers data after 40'000 power on hours, and that WD from being the best drives manufacturer turned into Aliexpress-level joke brand, and therefore I've decided to give Transcend drives another chance. I plan to build a storage array with 4x PCIe v4 NVMe drives model 250S, if you know any issues or nuances about these drives then please tell in the comments.
