SanDisk Extreme II 240GB SSD Review

Today we are looking at the latest high speed Solid State drive from Sandisk, the Extreme II. This follows on from our review of the Ultra Plus 256GB Solid State drive which we reviewed back in March this year. The previous generation SanDisk Extreme adopted a SandForce controller however the latest Extreme II model has the Marvell 88SS9187 controller onboard. Is this a drive you should be shortlisting for a new system build this year? This SanDisk Extreme II is the companies flagship model, utilising the SATA 6Gbps interface. They claim it will deliver read and write speeds up to 550 MB/s and 510 MB/s respectively, for the 240GB drive we are reviewing today. The new drive supports TRIM and S.M.A.R.T. features and is rated at a MTBF of 2,000,000 hours. They are offering the drive in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities. SanDisk offer a full 5 year warranty with each drive, for peace of mind. Our review sample arrived in a large, company branded box. Inside, the drive itself and a USB flash drive with literature and images. Retail packaging is likely to be different from this. The drive itself matches the box artwork, company branded in a black chassis with the logo at the bottom. The rear of the case has a sticker with the product size, serial number and other details. The case is easy to remove and inside there are various pads to aid with PCB component cooling. Sandisk are using the Marvell 88SS9187 controller (codename Monet). This is a 2 bit per cell MLC NAND (19nm eX2 ABL MLC NAND) however each MLC NAND has a portion set to operate in SLC/pseudo SLC mode. SanDisk call this their nCache. The nCache is used as a lower latency, high performance write buffer. The Ultra Plus drive which we reviewed back in March used 7% spare NAND allocated to the nCache. SanDisk have doubled the amount of spare area on the drive which in theory should help boost the nCache size. It is worth discussing the nCache a little as Sandisk have said that it can be utilised to improve data integrity as well as performance. SanDisk say that the page table is stored in nCache which means it should have a better chance of maintaining data integrity in the case of power failure. Writes to the nCache are faster than to the MLC portion of the NAND itself. The SanDisk Extreme II does not offer AES encryption or eDrive support. On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Main system: CPU: Intel Core i7 2700k Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24 PSU: ADATA 1200W Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise Monitor: Dell U2410 Other Drives (used in Core i7 2700k system above): OCZ Vertex 450 256GB Corsair Neutron 240GB Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB Visiontek Racer Series 120GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 120GB Mushkin Chronos 240GB Kingston HyperX 3k 120GB OCZ Vertex 4 512GB OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSD Review (firmware 1.4 update) Transcend SSD720 128GB Kingston SSDNow V+200 90GB OCZ Octane 512GB (V1.13 fw) Mach Xtreme MX-DS Turbo 120GB Corsair Performance Pro 256GB Samsung 830 Series 512GB Patriot Pyro SE 240GB Patriot Wildfire 240GB MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD OCZ Agility 3 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB ADATA S511 240GB Corsair F100 100GB Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB PCMark 7 system: CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K @ 4.4GHz Mobo: ASUS P8Z77-V LX RAM: 8GB Kingston Hyper-X 10th Anniversary SSD: 120GB Kingston V300 HDD: 1TB SATA III 6Gb/s GPU: 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660Ti ODD: 24x DVD-RW PSU: Corsair TX650V2 Cooler: Corsair H40 + Arctic MX4 Paste Case: Zalman Z11 PCIe drives test system: OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD & OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Test System: CPU: Intel Core i7 990x @ 4.8ghz Cooler: Corsair H100 Performance Liquid Cooler Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Black Edition Memory: 12GB Kingston DDR3 @ 1600mhz 9-9-9-24 PSU: ADATA 1200W Graphics: Nvidia GTX580 Chassis: Lian Li X2000F Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise Monitor: Dell U2410 Software: Atto Disk Benchmark CrystalMark AS SSD PCMark 7 IOMeter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. CrystalDiskmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.1 x64. Performance results are superb, with the SanDisk Extreme II 240Gb scoring close to the top of our charts. Results are strong in every test, especially in the 4k QD32 test. When we switch to the compressible enabled 0×00 test the performance of the drive holds, showing very well balanced results in both modes. Just what a performance geek wants to see. Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed in the last year. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Sequential performance is very good, although we noticed a little variance in this benchmark with the read figures. The read result peaked at 555 MB/s at 512 but in the 2,048, 4,096 and 8,192 tests performance would drop a little to just under 480 MB/s. Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. The AS SSD benchmark only deals with incompressible data and it does highlight weaknesses with specific controllers. The SanDisk Extreme II 240GB scores exceptionally well in this test, in the top 10% of the performance chart. Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months. PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use. The drive scores 5,370 points in this test, which is very strong. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. IOPS performance from the SanDisk Extreme II 240GB is strong, scoring almost 60K IOPS in the 4k random write test and 85K IOPS in the 4k random read test. It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific. Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure. The drive scores 22 seconds in this test, which is as fast as any other single drive we have tested to date. STALKER Call Of Pripyat takes 17 seconds to load on the SanDisk Extreme II 240GB drive, an excellent result. The SanDisk Extreme II 240GB certainly doesn't disappoint and it easily earns a place in the top five percent of performance oriented solid state drives available today. The results are certainly as good as we have seen this year, especially when tasked with both incompressible and compressible data types. Peak performance and data consistency are exceptionally high and IOPS performance means it will be ideally suited to deal with intensive database driven functions. SanDisk have clearly been tuning the firmware on this particular drive as it exhibits no specific weaknesses in any of the tests. As a balanced 'all round' performance solid state drive there is no better available on the market today. The Marvel 88SS9187 really leaves the Sandforce 2281 controller some distance behind when all performance attributes are considered as a whole. It was surprising to see that SanDisk have not equipped the unit with encryption or eDrive support, although we would imagine this will only affect a small portion of the potential target audience. It is reassuring to see that SanDisk are supporting the customer with a full 5 year warranty, for peace of mind. As long as this controller doesn't exhibit any concerns over the coming months, we have no hesitation in awarding the SanDisk Extreme II 240GB our MUST HAVE award. It is available from Amazon for £226.10 inc vat, so while it is currently a little more expensive than some other flagship Solid State drives the retail price is likely to drop over the coming months. It is currently £80 more expensive than the SanDisk Extreme 240GB unit from Amazon, so if you want to save some money, the older drive is still a good choice. Pros: strong IOPS performance. good with incompressible and compressible data. 7mm chassis - compatible with super thin laptops. Cons: Currently quite expensive. Kitguru says: A killer flagship drive from SanDisk. They mean business.