SanDisk Extreme PRO 480GB Review

Performance Analysis

As ever, sequential read performance is very high. Sequential write performance sees the Extreme PRO fall down the charts a little, more so in AS SSD than CrystalDiskMark, though it's result in the latter of 513MB/sec is hardly slow. Single queue depth random performance is almost perfectly in line the Extreme II for both reads and writes, leaving it with a mid-table result in both cases. At high queue depths, the Extreme PRO flexes its muscles a bit more, though it's not chart topping. It's a little ahead of the Extreme II on reads here, and more significantly ahead on writes – 19 percent in AS SSD and 28 percent in CDM. All in all, the synthetic results are entirely in line with what we'd expect given the quoted performance figures. As the limits of SATA and AHCI are reached, the small differences between most drives in these benchmarks needn't concern you much – the Extreme PRO 480GB has no major issues to speak of when it comes to peak performance.


In both PCMark 7 workloads, the Extreme PRO shows very minor improvements on the Extreme II, and its ranking doesn't really change. For the Starting Applications workload, its result of 102MB/sec leaves it trailing many drives from the likes of Samsung, OCZ, Crucial and so on. In the Gaming workload it responds a bit better with a result of 132MB/sec, though Samsung and Toshiba still have a lead on it. That said, the new SanDisk SSD is able to snatch victory from the hands of Samsung when it comes to Windows 7 boot times, albeit by a meaningless 0.03 seconds.


Our strenuous Iometer tests give us an idea of performance consistency, and it's indeed here that we see the largest gains over the Extreme II. The most write heavy workload, the Database one, results in a 22 percent increase, for example, though the result of 34,613 IOPS is still bettered by numerous SSDs here. Performance in the File Server workload is much stronger though – the Extreme PRO is a massive 33 percent faster than the Extreme II, and its result leaves it ahead of the SSD 850 PRO as well. The Workstation workload again shows a significant performance upgrade over the Extreme II. Its standing in the read-only Web Server run is rather low, but equally the differences between drives is small here, and most are able to handle the workload with relatively equal measure.

Conclusion

While our Iometer tests indicate that performance consistency has indeed been improved for the Extreme PRO, in every other area it's business as usual, and the drive is much the same as the Extreme II. That's hardly a bad thing, as the Extreme II isn't a slow SSD, but the Extreme PRO does find itself trailing some other drives in most of our benchmarks.


The Extreme PRO launched a few weeks back now, and when it did it brought a few new things to the SATA SSD space, which is becoming rarer now. For example, the 960GB drive was the first true 1TB-class SSD focussed on performance and consistency rather than price per GB, and the ten year warranty was also an industry first. However, since then we've seen the SSD 850 PRO, which also has a 1TB model and a ten year warranty that also carries an endurance rating which is almost double that of SanDisks and therefore of more appeal to heavy users. It's also faster, has excellent performance consistency, TCG Opal 2.0 encryption and, rounding it all off, an excellent software package in the form of Samsung Magician. Therefore, given that the price of Samsung's new SSD is set to be roughly in-line with SanDisk's, it's hard to recommend anything else in the performance SSD space.