The SanDisk X400 1TB SSD Review

ATTO

ATTO's Disk Benchmark is a quick and easy freeware tool to measure drive performance across various transfer sizes.

SanDisk X400 1TBCrucial BX100 1TBCrucial BX200 960GBCrucial MX200 1TBOCZ Trion 100 960GBOCZ Trion 150 960GBOCZ Vector 180 960GBSamsung 850 EVO 1TBSamsung 850 Pro 1TBSanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB

Aside from the write speeds that lag behind read speeds by a larger than normal margin, the ATTO results are reasonable and do not show signs of any major problems.

AS-SSD

AS-SSD is another quick and free benchmark tool. It uses incompressible data for all of its tests, making it an easy way to keep an eye on which drives are relying on transparent data compression. The short duration of the test makes it a decent indicator of peak drive performance.

None of these drives show any meaningful difference in AS-SSD sequential read speed, but the write speed limitations of the X400 do show up clearly on this test.

Idle Power Consumption

Since the ATSB tests based on real-world usage cut idle times short to 25ms, their power consumption scores paint an inaccurate picture of the relative suitability of drives for mobile use. During real-world client use, a solid state drive will spend far more time idle than actively processing commands. Our testbed doesn't support the deepest DevSlp power saving mode that SATA drives can implement, but we can measure the power usage in the intermediate slumber state where both the host and device ends of the SATA link enter a low-power state and the drive is free to engage its internal power savings measures.

We also report the drive's idle power consumption while the SATA link is active and not in any power saving state. Drives are required to be able to wake from the slumber state in under 10 milliseconds, but that still leaves plenty of room for them to add latency to a burst of I/O. Because of this, many desktops default to either not using SATA Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) at all or to only enable it partially without making use of the device-initiated power management (DIPM) capability. Additionally, SATA Hot-Swap is incompatible with the use of DIPM, so our SSD testbed usually has DIPM turned off during performance testing.

Slumber power drawn by the X400 is not quite the lowest but is still pretty good, but active idle power is twice as high as the OCZ Trion 150 based on the Toshiba TC58/Phison S10 controller platform.