SSD vendors that make one or more components of their drives tend to do better than those who just slap commodity parts on a board and call it a day. Sounds reasonable, right? SanDisk’s Extreme SSD is yet another drive based on the LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller, a 6Gb/s SATA SSD controller with speedy sequential reads and an emphasis on hyper-fast queued random writes.
However, because it is a NAND manufacturer, SanDisk has the means to use its own 24nm toggle-mode NAND—eight 256Gb packages in the 240GB version—instead of commodity NAND. Like other SF-2281-powered drives, the Extreme SSD uses the extra 16GB of NAND for overprovisioning and write caching.
SanDisk’s Extreme is a plain black metal box with a sticker on it and speed inside.
Contrary to its name, the Extreme SSD isn’t very extreme—at least not in the sense of being unusual. It’s a good implementation of the SF-2281 controller combined with high-quality NAND, so it’s not exactly rare, but that still means it’s one of the fastest consumer drives on the planet. With sustained read speeds over 480MB/s and writes around 280MB/s, its performance is what you’d expect from a good SandForce drive—faster than the Intel 520 in reads, slower in writes. Its random performance is classic SandForce territory too—heavily optimized for high-queue-depth 4KB random writes, with over 90,000 IOPS at a queue depth of 32.
There aren’t any surprises with the SanDisk Extreme SSD, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s fast, inexpensive (just over $1/GB at this writing), and based on a proven platform. You really can’t go wrong.
A fast, inexpensive, but fairly standard SF-2281 drive.
A fairly standard SF-2281 drive.
| SanDisk Extreme SSD | OCZ Vertex 4 | Patriot Pyro SE | OCZ Octane | Samsung 830 Series SSD | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capacity | 240GB | 256GB | 240GB | 512GB | 256GB |
| CrystalDiskMark | |||||
| Sustained Read (MB/s) | 479.1 | 440.9 | 482 | 445.4 | 506.4 |
| Sustained Write (MB/s) | 283.7 | 446.9 | 300.3 | 315.5 | 398.5 |
| AS SSD | |||||
| Seq. Read (MB/s) | 503.8 | 463 | 506.7 | 432.2 | 502.6 |
| Seq. Write (MB/s) | 278 | 459.3 | 295.2 | 285.9 | 164.1 |
| 4KB Read (IOPS) | 5,029 | 6,632 | 4,986 | 5,546 | 5,513 |
| 4KB Write (IOPS) | 15,244 | 17,169 | 14,179 | 10,417 | 12,800 |
| ATTO | |||||
| 64KB File Read (MB/s) | 490.3 | 396.7 | 443.24 | 408.57 | 405.85 |
| 64KB File Write (MB/s) | 441.3 | 470.4 | 487.9 | 287.02 | 515.05 |
| Iometer | |||||
| 4KB Random Write | 90,060.8 | 65,111.06 | 91,171.26 | 22,073.97 | 35,329.48 |
| Max Access Time (ms) | 30 | 285 | 41 | 429 | 31 |
| Premiere Pro Encode Write (sec) | 422 | 417 | 424 | 425 | 420 |
| PCMark Vantage x64 HDD | 58,366 | 41,568 | 61,686 | 57,030 | 62,168 |
| PCMark 11 x64 SST | 5,282 | 5,171 | 5,305 | 4,945 | 5,257 |
Best scores are bolded. Our current test bed is a 3.1GHz Core i3-2100 processor on an Asus P8 P67 Pro (B3 chipset) running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. All tests used onboard 6Gb/s SATA ports with latest Intel drivers.
Links:
[1] http://www.maximumpc.com/user/author1
[2] http://www.maximumpc.com/files/verdict-images/extreme_ssd_right_hr_small.jpg
[3] http://www.sandisk.com/
[4] http://www.maximumpc.com/articles/reviews/hardware
[5] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/hardware
[6] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/maximum_pc
[7] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/review
[8] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/sandisk_extreme_ssd_240gb
[9] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/ssd
[10] http://www.maximumpc.com/articles/magazine/2012/august
[11] http://www.maximumpc.com/articles/reviews
[12] http://www.maximumpc.com/articles/reviews/hardware/ssd
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