The SanDisk X400 1TB SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on May 6, 2016 9:00 AM ESTFinal Words
The SanDisk X400 is intended to be a high-end TLC SSD, and there aren't many of those to compare against. The Samsung 850 EVO is without question the fastest SATA SSD using TLC NAND, and for the most part it ranks as a high-end drive even when compared with SATA SSDs in general, not just drives with TLC NAND. Aside from that, most TLC SSDs are value-oriented SSDs that sacrifice much to reach the lowest possible prices. The SanDisk X400 is not one of those products.
On almost every test the SanDisk X400 is considerably faster than the next fastest drive with planar TLC NAND. The few occasions where the OCZ Trion 150 beats the SanDisk X400, in write performance, they are balanced by several tests where the X400 ties or beats MLC drives like the Crucial MX200 or OCZ Vector 180. The only notable performance weakness is sequential write speed, but this is not a severe handicap.
In addition to raising the bar for planar TLC performance, the SanDisk X400 sets a new standard for power efficiency of drives using TLC NAND. It routinely ties or beats at least a few MLC SSDs for power efficiency, especially when its performance is not lagging far behind.
With solid performance and power efficiency and a 5-year warranty on a generous write endurance rating, the SanDisk X400 has every right to ask a higher price than any other planar TLC SSD. The warranty and endurance rating also exceed that of some low-end MLC drives that don't have much performance advantage over the X400.
At the moment the SanDisk X400 is priced at or below the OCZ Trion 150 for most capacities, especially the 512GB that is one of the cheapest SSDs in its capacity class. At 1TB perhaps the most interesting comparison is against the Mushkin Reactor, still by far the cheapest 1TB MLC SSD. The Reactor is about $25 cheaper but only has a 3-year warranty and less than half the write endurance rating. Supply of the Crucial MX200 is drying up in advance of the MX300 launch, so there are not a lot of MLC drives priced close to the X400. Overall the X400 is a reasonable step up from the cheapest budget SSDs and priced far enough below drives like the Samsung 850 EVO to not be overshadowed.
| SSD Price Comparison | ||||
| Drive | 960GB 1TB |
480GB 512GB |
240GB 256GB |
120GB 128GB |
| OCZ Trion 150 | $243.49 | $129.98 | $59.99 | $43.74 |
| SanDisk Ultra II | $225.25 | $120.99 | $73.48 | $54.60 |
| SanDisk X400 | $244.95 | $113.99 | $78.93 | $46.99 |
| SanDisk Extreme Pro | $348.99 | $184.20 | $108.00 | |
| Crucial MX200 | Sold Out | $139.00 | $81.72 | |
| PNY CS2211 | $289.99 | $139.99 | $69.99 | |
| Mushkin Reactor | $219.99 | $149.99 | $79.99 | |
| Samsung 850 EVO | $324.99 | $149.99 | $90.19 | $66.75 |
It is refreshing to see a TLC drive that provides progress on something other than price. The X400 is a credible mid-range SSD that achieves SanDisk's goals and proves that even planar TLC NAND can compete for the mainstream segment.
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Billy Tallis - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I changed TiB to TB. In reality the sizes are only nominal. The exact capacity of the X400 is 1,024,209,543,168 bytes while 1TiB would be 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and 1000GB drives like the 850 EVO are 1,000,204,886,016 bytes.HollyDOL - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
yay, that's some black magic with spare areas / crc prossibly...X vs Xi prefixes are treatcherous... while with kilo it does only 2,4%, with Tera it's already 9,95%...more than enough to hide OS and majority of installed software :-)
bug77 - Tuesday, May 10, 2016 - link
Then you should put that into the article, unless you're intentionally trying to be misleading ;)SaolDan - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
Neat!!hechacker1 - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I'm tempted to buy two 512GB and RAID 0 them. Does anybody know if that would improve performance consistency compared to a single 1TB drive? I don't really care about raw bandwidth, but 4k IOPS for VMs. I'm having trouble finding benchmarks showing what RAID 0 does to latency outliersCaedenV - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
As someone who has been running 2 SSDs in RAID0 for the last few years I would recommend against it. That is not to say that I have had any real issues with it, just that it is not really worth doing.1) once you have a RAID your boot time takes much longer as you have to POST, RAID, and then POST again, then boot. This undoes any speed benefit for fast start times that SSDs bring you.
2) It adds points of failure. Having 2 drives means that things are (more or less) twice as likely to fail. SSDs are not as scary as they use to be, but it is still added risk for no real world benefit.
3) Very little real-world benefit. While in benchmarks you will see a bit of improvement, real world workloads are very bursty. And the big deal with RAID with mechanical drives is the ability to que up read requests in rapid succession to dramatically reduce seek time (or at least hide seek time). With SSDs there is practically no seek time to begin with, so that advantage is not needed. For read/write performance you will also see a minor increase, but typically the bottleneck will be at the CPU, GPU, or now even the bus itself.
Sure, if you are a huge power-user that is editing multiple concurrent 4K video streams then maybe you will need that extra little bit of performance... but for most people you would never notice the difference.
The reason I did it 4 years ago was simply a cost and space issue. I started with a 240GB SSD that cost ~$250 which was a good deal. Then when the price dropped to $200 I picked up another and put it in RAID 0 because I needed the extra space and could not afford a larger drive. Now with the price of a single 1TB drive so low, and with RAID having just as many potential issues as potential up-sides, I would just stick with a single drive and be done with it.
Impulses - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I did it with 2x 128GB 840s at one point and again last year for the same reasons, cost and space... 1TB EVO x2 (using a 256GB SM951 as OS drive) If I were to add more SSD space now I'd probably just end up with a 2TB EVO.Probably won't need to RAID up drives to form a single large-enough volume again in the future, this X400 is already $225 on Amazon (basically hours after the article went up with the $244 price).
I don't even need the dual 1TB in RAID in an absolute sense, but it's more convenient to have a single large volume shared by games/recent photos than to balance two volumes.
I don't think the downsides are a big deal, but I wouldn't do it for performance reasons either, and I backup often.
phoenix_rizzen - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
Get 4 of them and stick them into a RAID10. :)Lolimaster - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
There's no point in doind raid0 with SSD's. You won't decrease latency/access times or improve random 4k reads (they will be worse most of the time).Sequential gains are meaningless (if it matter to you then you should stick to a PCI-e/m.2 NVME drive)
Pinn - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I have the Samsung NVME M.2 512gb in the only m.2 slot and am aching to get more storage. Should I just fill one of my PCIe slots (x99)?