SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD (240GB, 480GB & 960GB) Review: The Fastest Just Got Faster
by Kristian Vättö on June 16, 2014 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- SanDisk
- Extreme Pro
AnandTech Storage Bench 2013
Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based - we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we are testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes. I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 - The Destroyer | ||
| Workload | Description | Applications Used |
| Photo Sync/Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Lightroom 4, Dropbox |
| Gaming | Download/install games, play games | Steam, Deus Ex, Skyrim, Starcraft 2, BioShock Infinite |
| Virtualization | Run/manage VM, use general apps inside VM | VirtualBox |
| General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, copy files, encrypt/decrypt files, backup system, download content, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware |
| Video Playback | Copy and watch movies | Windows 8 |
| Application Development | Compile projects, check out code, download code samples | Visual Studio 2012 |
We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the test workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we have been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.
Given that the Extreme II was already dominating the Storage Bench 2013, it doesn't come as a surprise that the Extreme Pro is the new crownholder. Even the SSD 730 and Vector 150 can't challenge the Extreme Pro despite the fact that in terms of pure random write performance they are better. I think SanDisk's strength lies in mixed read/write performance because write performance alone does not yield good results in real world workloads, which tend to be a mix of reads and writes.
In fact, client workloads (like our Storage Benches) are usually more read-centric anyway and in the case of the Extreme Pro, the drive spent over three times longer processing read IOs than write IOs, which makes sense because there are nearly four times more read IOs than there are write IOs in the trace (even though in terms of gigabytes the difference is only twofold).
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
85 Comments
View All Comments
ninjag - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
Where can I find these 10000% washing machines? I have been tracking this market for years, and I am so tired of incremental 5% gains on washing machine silicon. WE WANT INNOVATION!!!brucek2 - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Its discussions like this that make it hard for me to get a feel for whether it would matter to me or not.On the one hand, 162% sounds plenty substantial. I do not want to spend 162% more immersion-breaking time twiddling my thumbs waiting for the next level to load, let alone 162% more time to get through a compile so I can meet my next deadline.
On the other hand, waiting 1/1,000th of a second does not actually sound any faster to me than waiting 1/4,000th of a second (these are the "average service times" in the benchmark), because I know my personal threshold for perceiving laggy response kicks in at around 0.1 seconds.
So where does this leave me? Not sure really but in the case of doubt it probably goes to spend more. The extra $100-$200 of potential hardware savings would be eaten up quickly in my time to research it much further, to end up ordering & installing & migrating to another drive sooner than I otherwise would have, or if I really did end up twiddling my thumbs more.
But never fear MyrddinE, I'm still not buying the 99.8% pure unicorn dust super connect audio cables.
mickulty - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
There are plenty of use cases where every little helps - a 5% overclock, assuming linear scaling, would shave ~8.5 minutes off a 3 hour video transcoding task for example.UltraTech79 - Sunday, June 29, 2014 - link
See but actual users do not do "blind tests" they do actual tests for their servers to see what is better. You dont need to feel the difference between 5 and 10 to know what number is higher.n13L5 - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
In many cases, you are correct. But if you were just teetering near sufficient performance, a 5% performance increase to stay solidly just above 30 fps, the difference will suddenly become very obvious to perceive.UltraTech79 - Sunday, June 29, 2014 - link
Yes. No one would notice......Except the sort of people that would read these kinds of articles. Your logic is a failure.
vaayu64 - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
Thanks for a nice review. Do you know if Sandisk is going to release an mSata version of this ?Sadly, there isn't a good msata ssd > 240 GB capacity and with good performance consistency in the market right now....
Regards
457R4LDR34DKN07 - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
I know what you mean because when I built my mITX I think the only drive I could find was the ocz nocti 128GB. If I was going to upgrade it I would go with a Samsung 840 evo but mSATA isn't worth investing into at this point with M.2 arrival IMO.vaayu64 - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
The 840 evo msata is without doubt a very nice ssd, but TRIM is not supported on that one.ijozic - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Where did you get that (mis)information from?