Reviews - SanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB

[HEXUS]

The enthusiast SSD made for consistency.

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[DemonHighwayman]

So is this a Samsung 840 Pro beater ? and if so I wonder how it'll compare to the slightly overdue Samsung 850 Pro !

[LeetyMcLeet]

This is exactly what we need with SSDs. Decent 'used' performance and a good warranty
(10 years really is excellent)!

They're clearly targeting Sammy and Intel with these drives. Hopefully, we'll see a fall in prices as they compete

[Tpyo]

I still don't understand why if SATA is the bottleneck, they don't make more of these drives PCIe or other connectors. Those that do seem to ask for a ridiculous premium (even the non-enterprise models), but often aren't making use of the extra bandwidth (small drives with low-ish read/writes that would not have been bottlenecked). Is there a technical reason why this is difficult/expensive?

Also M2 - is it any faster than dual SATA that it seems to replace on some boards that have it? Is there a technical reason (other than current models only having one) why you couldn't connect an SSD to 2 SATA ports nd double the bandwidth available?

Apologies for all the questions.

[crossy]

I still don't understand why if SATA is the bottleneck, they don't make more of these drives PCIe or other connectors. Those that do seem to ask for a ridiculous premium (even the non-enterprise models), but often aren't making use of the extra bandwidth (small drives with low-ish read/writes that would not have been bottlenecked). Is there a technical reason why this is difficult/expensive?

As I understand it, the SATA "limitation" is only if you look at theoretical performance not actual. Although I've seen some posts elsewhere claiming that real-world (/delivered) performance on the top-of-the-line single drives is now getting pretty close to the interface limit. Definitely agree though that PCIe connection would make a heck of a lot of sense for those rich kids with RAID0 SSD setups.

Downside is that PCIe slots are under pressure for other things, and heaven help you if you've got one (or worse, two) of those large graphics cards that overhang the neighbouring slots and reduce your slot count even further.

Was looking at mSATA drives (for a bit of iPod hackery in the autumn) and was gob-smacked to see that apparently these SSD's are apparently drawing more power than the conventional 1.8" HDDs. Goes counter to the "SSD's draw less power than spinning rust drives" wisdom.

So is this a Samsung 840 Pro beater ? and if so I wonder how it'll compare to the slightly overdue Samsung 850 Pro !

I'm also interested in how these compare to the Samsung drives since I've got a mix of 830's and 840EVO's here, (no PRO drives). That said, Sandisk's pricing looks pretty good, and that 10 year warranty is a big plus point in my book unless there's some kind of weird constraints applied. I've already had to use Sandisk's warranty service this year for a failed micro-SD card and the experience was as pleasant/trouble-free as those kind of activities can be.

Roughly 50p/GB for that top drive has got me thinking that I might be able to go totally-SSD at some early point next year.

[jimbok11]

So...main plus of opting for this over a cheaper MX100 is the consistency over time and the warranty?

[Tarinder]

So...main plus of opting for this over a cheaper MX100 is the consistency over time and the warranty?

That pretty much sums it up, yup.

[narz]

Excuse the ignorance, but does anyone know how important consistency over time is and what type of applications are likely to benefit from it? Is the margin in difference shown in this article noticeable in real world usage.

TIA

[crossy]

Excuse the ignorance, but does anyone know how important consistency over time is and what type of applications are likely to benefit from it? Is the margin in difference shown in this article noticeable in real world usage.

1. How important consistency over time is really depends on what you're doing. If you're doing something sensitive to the performance of your storage - like video work for example - then I'd guess you'd really want that consistency.
2. All applications are affected to an extent - e.g. a degraded SSD will take longer to load that large game. But whether that gives you problems (as opposed to just seeing a spinning cursor for longer) really depends on what app you're using and what you're doing with it.
3. Again, depends on what you're doing - check the graph and you'll see that the degraded MX100 appears to only deliver 1/7th of the bandwidth of the same device in "clean" state. Ask yourself this - if my data takes 7x longer to load will I notice?

My own "wet finger in the air" feeling is that a degraded SSD is only really going to be noticed for the majority of folks if they're trying to do a lot of actions simultaneously and stressing the disk.

Another good set of PC Mark consistency tests can be found here, these focusing on Adobe Photoshop use.