SanDisk Extreme II Review (480GB, 240GB, 120GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 3, 2013 7:19 PM ESTFinal Words
SanDisk's Extreme II is an amazingly consistent performer. Joining the ranks of Seagate's SSD 600 and Corsair's Neutron, the Extreme II offers a balance of good peak performance and performance consistency. The former is important with any high end product, while the latter is important for any SSD where the user wants to use as much of the drive's capacity as possible. SanDisk picked a very good balance of IO consistency and peak performance, resulting in the best scores we've ever seen in our new storage benchmark for 2013 (a test that happens to greatly value drives with good worst case scenario performance). As a flagship drive, SanDisk also ships the Extreme II with a nice 5 year warranty.
The Extreme II is an above average performer when it comes to power consumption. Samsung's SSD 840 Pro still holds the title as having the lowest HIPM+DIPM slumber power but the Extreme II isn't power hungry enough to be a problem for mobile users. Power consumption under load is fine as well.
The only complaint I really have about the Extreme II is the lack of encryption/eDrive support. If you don't care about running with encryption enabled however, there's really nothing wrong with SanDisk's Extreme II. It's honestly my favorite client SSD on the market today. What I'm particularly excited about is the potential for all of the work SanDisk has put into the Extreme II's firmware to spill over into its OEM drives as well.
Assuming there are no strange compatibility issues or firmware problems that develop, the Extreme II will likely become one of my most recommended SSDs. Far too often I have to supply the caveat of "make sure you don't fill the drive!" whenever I recommend an SSD. With great worst case performance and good IO consistency in that state, I can recommend SanDisk's Extreme II without any stipulations which I greatly appreciate.
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HardwareDufus - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
Amazing. I am using an OCZ Vertex4 256GB drive. Bought it last Nov for about $224. Very happy with it.This SanDisk drive is the same price ($229), same capacity (240GB), same format. However, it is performing a full 5% to almost 100% better, depending on block size, random/sequential, read/write activity. Amazing what 7 to 12 months has brought to the SSD market!
Vincent - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
You wrote: "In our Intel SSD DC S3700 review I introduced a new method of characterizing performance: looking at the latency of individual operations over time"In fact this is not what your test does. Your test records IOPS in one-second periods, but does not measure the latency of individual IOs. It would in fact be interesting to see the latency distribution for these drives.
Tjalve - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Ive done som IO Latency tests based on my own trace-based benchmark if your interested.http://www.nordichardware.se/SSD-Recensioner/svens...
http://www.nordichardware.se/SSD-Recensioner/svens...
http://www.nordichardware.se/SSD-Recensioner/svens...
The text is in swedish, but you should be able to understand the graphs. I could make aplot diagram of individual IOs Latency if anyone is interested,
kallogan - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
I still have an indilinx 64GB.dishayu - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Is it just me or have the SSD prices stagnated since the past year or so? I bought a 120GB Plextor M5S for $85 in July 2012 and the 128 GB SSDs still seem to hover in the 100-120$ range.sna1970 - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Hey Anand , can you please test 6 SSD Raid 0 with the new Haswell Z87 motherboards ?we need to make sure we can hit 3G/s , what is the maximum bandwidth of the new chipset ?
cbk - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
This looks awesome, it's almost neck-to-neck to the 840 Pro, at a lower price.jeffrey - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Hi Anand,Do you plan on covering the OCZ Vertex 450?
jeffrey - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Press Release:http://ocz.com/consumer/company/newsroom/press/ocz...
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
All tests have been run but I guess Haswell and other Computex stuff got on the way.