SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB SSD Review

Today we are looking at the SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB Solid State drive which features a Marvell SS889175 processor and SanDisk 19nm memory. Prices of this drive have dropped in recent weeks to around £130 inc vat. Is this an ideal large capacity drive to be shortlisting for a new system build? Sandisk have targeted the SSD market hard in the last year and their Extreme drive was close to the top of the charts, featuring the SandForce SF-2281. Due to reliability issues last year with the 2281 controller many enthusiast users have been looking at other options, such as the Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller featured in the OCZ Vector SSD. How does the Marvell SS889175 cope with our extensive stress testing? Specifications: Available capacities: 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB Dimensions: 028 in. x 2.75 in. x 3.95 in. (7.0 mm x 69.85 mm x 100.5 mm) Operating temperature: -32ºF to 158ºF (0ºC to 70 ºC) Storage temperature: -67ºF to 203ºF (-55ºC to 85ºC) Interface: SATA Revision 3.0 (6 Gbit/s) Shock: Resistant up to 1500 G @ 0.5 m/sec Vibration (Operating/Non-operating) : 5 gRMS, 10-2000 Hz / 4.9 gRMS, 7-800Hz Power Consumption (active): 0.12w Support: Three-year limited warranty The SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB SSD ships in a small package detailing the capacities, key selling points along with an image of the product. Inside the package is user manual and rubber mount. The Sandisk Ultra Plus ships inside an anti static bag which is sealed. We immediately noticed how light the drive was compared to a normal Solid State Drive. Now we know why. The PCB takes up around 40% of the total chassis space, screwed into one side with a thermal pad on the other side. The company sent us the largest 256GB model, with 128GB and 64GB models also available. The 256GB version ships with four 19nm SanDisk NAND modules, sized at 64GB each, two of which are on either side of the PCB. We can see the Marvell SS889175 controller and 128MB of Samsung DDR2 DRAM which operates as the cache. The drive features nCache, meaning that a small portion of the 19nm NAND is configured as a SLC cache. The Marvell processor can aggregate small random writes then via the cache, flushing them out. This should help long term life of the drive, and MTBF is rated at 2,000,000 hours which would verify this. Sandisk rate this drive at a maximum of 530MB/s sequential read and 445 MB/s sequential write. The 128GB version of this drive has a reduced write speed of up to 290 MB/s and the 64GB drops even further, up to 155MB/s. 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): 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 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. Overall performance is excellent, achieving a sequential read speed of 504.5MB/s and a maximum sequential write speed of 447 MB/s. 4KQD32 performance falls just above half way in the chart. When we switch to the 0x00 test the performance of the drive holds at pretty much the same level, which is an excellent result. 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. When we tested this drive with ATTO we ended up getting a very varied set of results. It fluctuated quite often and although it peaked around the 520 MB/ read and 460 MB/s mark, when we recorded the 2,048 result, performance had dropped. 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. AS SSD only deals with incompressible data and Sandforce 2281 drives will often score quite badly in this test. The Marvell SS889175 controller in the SanDisk however scores well, slotting in just above mid way in the table above. 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. Good strong results in all the tests, highlighting again the balanced performance from the Marvell controller. 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. The IOPS performance of this drive is quite commendable, especially when reading 4k data. SanDisk rate the drive as capable of 82K IOPS (random read) and 39K (random write). We matched this with our 4k random test, but the read test peaked at around 66k. 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 fluctuated in this test, between 22 and 23 seconds. Around 70% of the time, it was closer to 23 seconds, so we rounded it down to the closest second. Good results in this test, averaging 19 seconds. Not up there with the fastest drives, but quick. The SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB is a well rounded, capable Solid State drive that now hits the £130-£140 mark in the United Kingdom. It is not at the same performance level as the fastest drives available today, but the results throughout our testing are certainly commendable. The Sandisk Ultra Plus 256GB drive is powered by the Marvell SS889175 controller and it deals with incompressible and compressible data equally well. It isn't quite at the same level as the Marvell SS889187 dual core controller which we tested recently powering the Plextor 128GB M5M mSATA drive. We noticed a little fluctuation when testing the Ultra Plus 256GB, especially in the ATTO benchmark, something we didn't experience with the same test system and the drive powered by the Marvell SS889187 controller. Sequential read speed is around the 500-510MB/s mark (read) and 445 MB/s (write). This places the drive a little lower than the market leaders, although in real world situations it really would be difficult to ascertain differences. IOPS performance is very good and better than many drives in a similar category. The drive was available at Amazon for £130, but it has sold out and Amazon are pushing partner sales now (£15 higher). SCAN are selling it for £139.50 inc vat. If you are looking for a less expensive option at a similar capacity, then the 250GB Samsung 840 Series is available for only £127.98 inc vat. Pros: Price point is decent. good performance with compressible and incompressible data. IOPS performance is above average. Cons: a lot of competition. A marginal price drop would help. outperformed by market leaders. Kitguru says: A solid all round purchase, especially if you need to deal with incompressible and compressible data on a regular basis.