Especially in the industrial sector, Transcend is a well-known manufacturer of digital storage products. With products ranging from DRAM modules and card readers to internal and external SSDs, the company also operates in the consumer market.

The company unveiled the ESD310C, a portable SSD in the shape of a thumb drive, in April 2023. The USB 3.2 Gen 2 enters the 10 Gbps-class PSSD market with claimed read and write speeds of up to 1050 MBps and 950 MBps, respectively. The availability of Type-A and Type-C interfaces is the primary differentiator. Four capacity points are available: 1 TB, 2 TB, 512 GB, and 256 GB.
Earlier in the year. In an effort to appeal to a wider range of customers, Transcend's ESD310C sticks to a traditional thumb drive design and places a strong emphasis on price in the same dual-interface market. This review examines the new ESD310C's 1 TB model's performance and value proposition in-depth, paying special attention to how it compares to the other players in the market.

Introduction and Product Impressions
Over the past ten years, bus-powered direct-attached storage devices have increased in speed and storage capacity. The introduction of palm-sized flash-based storage devices that can deliver 2GBps+ speeds has been made possible by the development of 3D NAND and NVMe, as well as faster host interfaces for external devices (like Thunderbolt and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2).
The thumb drive form factor dominated the UFD market until the introduction of SATA bridge-based PSSDs. For a brief period, vendors like Corsair and Mushkin experimented with SATA SSDs hidden behind USB bridge chips; however, the thumb drive UFDs' size and thermal solution made them cumbersome. Recent years have seen the release of high-performance native UFD controllers from Silicon Motion and Phison, which have improved performance and restored the viability of this category. In August 2021, the Crucial X6, which came with the Phison U17, was reviewed; however, it wasn't a genuine thumb drive. Silicon Motion has had great success in that specific category because of the popularity of the Kingston DataTraveler Max series (which has different SKUs for Type-A and Type-C drives).


  • Dual interface support in a single unit (both Type-A and Type-C)
  • Reduced width to keep adjacent USB ports free for use
  • Highly compact and lightweight
  • Caps at either end to protect connectors from dust and accidental damage

In an effort to highlight the versatility of their UFD controller, Silicon Motion contacted us to review the Transcend ESD310C. The portable SSD with a capacity of 1 TB was provided by the manufacturer to test it using our direct-attached storage suite.


The ESD310C has an usb drive-like industrial design, consisting of a rectangular metal body with plastic tabs displaying interface connectors at either end. Plastic is used to make the protective caps. Even though the metal body offers some rigidity, the plastic caps and the device's general lightweight and compact design give it a fragile appearance.

In this review, a variety of other 1 TB PSSDs in both thumb drive and palm form factors will be compared to the ESD310C. A brief summary of the internal storage device's capabilities is given by CrystalDiskInfo. The SM2320 has not yet been incorporated into the tracked controllers, so many entries are labeled as vendor-specific, and some of the capabilities (like the interface) are misinterpreted because the program interprets each bridge chip/controller differently. On the other hand, temperature readouts and other S.M.A.R.T. features functioned effectively.

S.M.A.R.T Passthrough - CrystalDiskInfo




The evaluation consists of more than just the testbed hardware. The typical workloads for memory cards with direct-attached storage have also changed over the past few years. High bit-rate 4K 60 frames per second videos are now fairly common, and 8K videos are beginning to appear. Because of the high-resolution textures and artwork, game install sizes have also been consistently increasing, even on portable gaming consoles. In light of this, our portable SSD and UFD evaluation scheme comprises several workloads, each of which is covered in detail in the corresponding section.

  • Synthetic workloads using CrystalDiskMark and ATTO
  • Real-world access traces using PCMark 10's storage benchmark
  • Custom robocopy workloads reflective of typical DAS usage
  • Sequential write stress test


Performance Benchmarks

The performance of the direct-attached storage device can be quickly viewed with the aid of benchmarks like ATTO and CrystalDiskMark. The results correspond to the instantaneous performance figures that customers can anticipate for particular workloads; however, they do not take into consideration behavioral variations that may occur when the unit is subjected to thermal throttling or long-term conditioning. These artificial benchmarks can also be used to collect data about support for particular performance-affecting storage device features.


Final Words

The Transcend ESD310C was introduced in April 2023 and is slowly making its way to retailers around the world. The Transcend ESD310C should satisfy the requirements of most mainstream consumers - folks who don't expect to transfer 100s of GBs in one shot to the UFD. On the other hand, the OWC Envoy Pro Mini does have its own value proposition for prosumers with its unparalleled thermal design and excellent performance consistency under worst-case conditions.