SanDisk Ultra II 240 GB SSD review - Article

SanDisk Ultra II SSD series

SanDisk has released the affordable Ultra II series SSD which we'll benchmark and review. Performance wise these SSDs will be fast with exceptional reads, and with writes - thanks to Toggle NAND flash - a little slower. However armed with a very competitive price/performance ratio, these things will kick the proverbial azz in a laptop or mainstream PC.  Meet the “affordable SSD” from SanDisk, as we review their all new Ultra II SSDs with nCache technology. The successor SSD is made in-house by SanDisk themselves including the PCB design and the actual NAND storage flash memory. The SSD series has been developed alongside a Marvel controller tied to SanDisk NAND flash memory.

With the Ultra II series Sandisk ups their more affordable SSD series a notch. It is a bit faster, but more importantly, SanDisk focused at pricing. Half a year ago prices where settling at just under 1 USD per GB for the end-user. That level has now roughly halved again. 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. SanDisk pairs the SSD series with a Marvell (88SS9190-BJM2) controller, and they combine it with their own and latest Toggle NAND flash memory. The end result is a SSD series that is offering very decent specs, these devices passes 550 MB/s in reads and 500 MB/sec 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 the new Ultra II SKUs with a Marvell (88SS9190-BJM2) controller. Sandisk submitted the 240 GB model with nice specs as these models have advertised sustained read/write levels of 550/500 MB/sec. SanDisk Ultra II SSDs supports TRIM and S.M.A.R.T. features and has a mean time between failures (MTBF2) of 1,750,000 hours, making the drives highly reliable to secure valuable personal data, essential for today’s mobile computing applications. 

Three SKUs will be released by them:

• SDSSDHII-120G-G25 – 120GB
• SDSSDHII-240G-G25 – 240GB
• SDSSDHII-480G-G25 – 480GB
• SDSSDHII-960G-G25 – 960GB

With 4K random read performance estimated at roughly 90.000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) it is here to make a sturdy for the money impression alright. Have a peek, after which we'll dive into the technology behind it and obviously we'll present you a nice performance overview.

 
Sandisk Ultra II SSDs series with 19nm SanDisk TLC Toggle NAND and Marvell 88SS9190 controller