SanDisk Extreme II 120 - 240 and 480 GB SSD review - Article

The SanDisk Extreme II SSD series

SanDisk today releases their all new Extreme II series SSD, which we benchmark and review. These SSDs, for the bigger part, are made in-house by SanDisk themselves including the PCB design and the actual NAND storage flash memory. The end result is a blazing fast SSD series that even surprised us when it comes to raw read performance. The SSD series has been developed alongside a Marvel controller tied to SanDisk NAND flash memory, it is amongst the fastest drives we have ever tested!

While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing in a fast pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking. 450 to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that, in the past year NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices now roughly settle at just under 1 USD per GB for the end-user. As such, SSD technology and NAND storage have gone mainstream. The market is huge, fierce and competitive, but it brought us where we are today offering nice volume SSDs at way more acceptable prices.

Combined with with very fast performance, SanDisk figured, let's take the Marvell Monet (88SS9187-BLD2) controller and combine it with their own and latest 19nm NAND flash memory. Combined with their own highly evolved firmware that forms the essence that is the Extreme II series. The Extreme II is a SATA 3 (also known as SATA 6G, SATA 6 Gbps and SATA 600) SSD that has been beefed up to shock, awe and conquer. The device passes 500 MB/s in both read and writes (depending on the volume size of the SSD).

Now I state this in all my SSD reviews; not one test system in my lab has a HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive and retrieve my bigger chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise. Today's product passed crazy read speeds of 550 MB/sec with measured write speeds of 520 MB/sec (for the 240GB version). When you think about that performance and place it in relation to real-world performance (if the source is equally fast), that means you could copy the entire contents of a CDROM in just over a second to the SSD and a DVD in less than 10 seconds.

SanDisk launched this new Extreme II SKUs with a Marvell Monet (88SS9187-BLD2) controller tied to high performance 19nm SanDisk Synchronous NAND. Sandisk submitted the 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB model with seriously impressive specs as these models have advertised sustained read/write levels of 550 MB/sec and 510 MB/sec respectively. SanDisk Extreme II SSD supports TRIM and S.M.A.R.T. features and has a mean time between failures (MTBF2) of 2,000,000 hours, making the drives highly reliable to secure valuable personal data, essential for today’s mobile computing applications. And with 4K random write performance estimated at roughly 75,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) it is here to make a sturdy impression alright. Have a peek, after which we'll dive into the technology behind it and obviously we'll present you a nice phat performance overview.

But talk is cheap, I bet you wanna have a look at the product first, eh? 

 
Sandisk Extreme II 120, 240 and 480GB SSDs with 19nm SanDisk NAND and Marvell 88SS9187 SATA controller