SanDisk X300s (512GB) Review

Final 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.

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.

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.