SanDisk Extreme PRO 480 GB SSD review - Product showcase

Product showcase

The following images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon DSLR shooting 12 MegaPixel photos.

Right; as always we start with the really simple stuff, packaging. The sample SanDisk submitted was a 480GB kit. Performance is listed at up-to 550MB/s read and 520MB/s writes with roughly 90K IOPS.

And there it is, this is the 2.5" SATA III SSD. As always, you should easily be able to place it somewhere in your chassis or laptop. Small and light-weight. The SSD supports TRIM making sure your SSD will regain its speed once in idle. Obviously you do need to connect it to a proper SATA 3 (6G) controller though, the best ones can be found on the Intel series 7, 8 and 9 chipset based products. We also find the new AMD FM2 based chipsets like the 85X and series 9 to perform well.

When we look at the connectors, we spot the standard power and Serial ATA connectors. This drive is SATA3 (6G). Obviously your system is backwards compatible for SATA2 as well, but the bandwidth limitation there would be capped to roughly 270 MB/sec (which still is silly fast compared to HDDs). A proper SATA 6G cable is recommended and should be delivered with your motherboard. We however never ever had issues with a standard SATA2 cable either. It seems that SATA3 cables are a little thicker, that's all.