SanDisk X300s (512GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on August 21, 2014 2:15 PM ESTFinal Words
The X300s is essentially a slower version of the Extreme Pro with encryption support. For typical office and corporate workloads the performance is fine and the X300s is also power efficient, which means longer battery life in a laptop. That will obviously be important if the laptop is used while on the go.
| NewEgg Price Comparison (7/29/2014) | |||||
| 64GB | 120/128GB | 240/256GB | 480/512GB | 1TB | |
| SanDisk X300s | $80 | $120 | $210 | $380 | - |
| Intel SSD Pro 2500 | - | $115 | $147 | $272 | - |
| Samsung SSD 850 PRO | - | $130 | $200 | $400 | $700 |
| Samsung SSD 840 EVO | - | $90 | $140 | $250 | $470 |
| Crucial MX100 | - | $80 | $115 | $220 | - |
| Crucial M550 | - | $95 | $150 | $240 | $447 |
In the end, it all boils down to pricing, though, and that is not in favor of the X300s. At 128GB the price is still decent since it includes Wave's software that is worth $40, but at 256GB and 512GB the pricing is quite high. Even if the value of the software is subtracted from the retail price, the X300s is still expensive. To make the comparison fair, I only included drives that support TCG Opal 2.0 / eDrive in the table, which are the X300s' competitiors in the market.
| Comparison of ISV Support | |||||||||
| SanDisk X300s | Intel SSD Pro 2500 | Samsung SSD 850 PRO | Samsung SSD 840 EVO | Crucial MX100 | Crucial M550 | ||||
| Wave EMBASSY Security Center | X | X | - | X | - | X | |||
| McAfee Drive Encryption | X | X | - | - | - | - | |||
| WinMagic SecureDoc | X | X | - | X | - | X | |||
| Absolute Software Secure Drive | X | - | - | - | - | - | |||
| Dell Data Protection | - | X | - | - | - | - | |||
| Checkpoint Full Disk Encryption | X | - | - | - | - | - | |||
However, I decided to take the comparison one step further and included a comparison of ISV (Independent Software Vendor) support. Basically, the table above tells whether the drive has been validated to work with a certain encryption software and it gives a pretty good picture as to why SanDisk and Intel have separate business SSD lineups. While all the SSDs in the table support TCG Opal 2.0 and eDrive, only the X300s and Pro 2500 have actually been validated by several ISVs. In other words, SanDisk and Intel have taken the extra time and money to work with the ISVs before launching the products, whereas Samsung and Crucial seem to focus on ISV validation post-launch. The 850 Pro and MX100 are currently not supported by any ISVs (at least based on their public compatibility lists) but I am sure that at least Wave and WinMagic will validate the drives sooner than later.
For an SSD that is targeted at business users, it is logical to ensure broad ISV support before the launch, but it still does not justify the price of the X300s. It does offer the broadest ISV support but that argument only holds weight if you plan on using Absolute Software's Secure Drive or Checkpoint's Full Disk Encryption. Otherwise the SSD Pro 2500 offers the same ISV support at a much lower price, or if you plan to use Wave, WinMagic or eDrive the 840 EVO and M550 provide an even better value.
All in all, I like SanDisk's approach of including encryption software with the X300s to make sure that every user has an easy way to enable Opal encryption, but that is ruined by the high pricing. With prices closer to the SSD Pro 2500, we could recommend the X300s over the SSD Pro 2500 as it provides higher performance and already includes Wave's encryption suite. Of course, the retail prices may not tell the whole truth since corporations are likely to buy the drives in bulk with a discount, but as it stands the retail prices at least are too high to make the X300s a good value relative to competing offerings.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
34 Comments
View All Comments
hojnikb - Friday, August 22, 2014 - link
*at a cost of capacity :) :)Kristian Vättö - Friday, August 22, 2014 - link
Yeah, fundamentally SLC, MLC and TLC are the same. Of course there are some silicon level optimizations to better fit the characteristics of each technology but the underlaying physics are the same.I'm thinking that pseudo-SLC is effectively just combining the voltage states of MLC/TLC. I.e. output of 11 or 10 from the NAND would read as 1, which allows for higher endurance since it doesn't matter if the actual voltage state switches from 11 to 10 due to the oxide wear out.
Spoony - Friday, August 22, 2014 - link
I believe you'd lose half the capacity on your drive. The MLC drives store two bits per cell, so they would store a 1 and a 0 for example. If you now are only allowing it to store a 1, then you've halved the capacity of the cell. Across the entire drive, this would thus halve the total drive capacity.As far as performance (read/write speed) I think this would be affected less. SSDs rely on parallelism to extract performance from NAND. The array is just as parallel as before. There might be an impact to performance having to do with extracting less information from each cell, how much this would be I'm not sure.
I think the changes to firmware would have to be much more substantial than just re-programming how many bits per cell are stored. There is most likely a lot of interesting logic around voltage handling at very small scales. Perhaps even looking at how voltages from neighbouring cells influence each other. I'm not sure how serious this firmware gets regarding physics, but it must have to do some sort of compensation because the drives seem pretty reliable.
hojnikb - Friday, August 22, 2014 - link
Yeah, ive "edited" the post to reflect the loss of capacity. Obviously capacity drops, but its still waay cheaper than real SLC solutions.I bet write speeds would actually go up (since this is the exact reason why samsung and sandisk are doing pSLC) but read would stay unaffected (since this is controller/interface limited anyway).
BillyONeal - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Erm, what is MBAM for then? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh82607... My work PC has remotely managed BitLocker.
Zink - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
MBAM is "Malwarebytes Anti-Malware" malware removal toolBillyONeal - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
@Zink: It is also "Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Management"Kristian Vättö - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Looks like I should have done my research better. Thanks for the heads up, I've edited the review to remove the incorrect reference.thecoolnessrune - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Yep, I the company I work with also has all of our drives encrypted with Bitlocker. It's managed by MBAM and integrated right into the rest of Active Directory Management. Really simple for the Domain Administrators (and relevant IT HelpDesk personnel) to use and manage.eDrive can fit in the Enterprise environment quite well.
cbf - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Yup. As the other commenters indicate, the only thing we care about in the Enterprise is BitLocker. Hell, even if it was my personal drive, I'd probably only use BitLocker. I just trust it more than the third party solutions.So why don't you review this drive's encryption features using BitLocker. Anand showed how to do this last April: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6891/hardware-accele...