Introduction
Two weeks ago, SanDisk launched a few memory products in Singapore in conjunction with their 20th Anniversary. We managed to get our hands on the new SanDisk Extreme II SATA 6Gbps Solid State Drive and decided to put it to test against one of the top SSD in the market – Samsung 840 Pro. Focusing on the technology that is used in the SanDisk Extreme II, we find out why SanDisk Extreme II can be probably called one of the fastest 2.5″ enthusiast grade SSD in the market, claiming its name as the flagship SSD for SanDisk.
Controller and Flash used
SanDisk uses a Marvell 88SS9187 SSD Controller which is also similar to those found other top of the line SSDs. This third generation Marvell Controller promises performance of over 500MB/s and features SATA 3.1 support, which includes queued TRIM commands improving the overall SSD performance. Coupled with the controller is the use of SanDisk’s own flash memory made through a 19nm process. The drive uses Toggle NAND technology which is the brainchild of a joint venture between SanDisk and Toshiba. It is one of the fastest and best NAND technology found in consumer grade SSDs. Toggle NAND allows the whole SSD unit to consume less power as compared to synchronous NAND by eliminating the clock signal typically used in synchronous DDR memories.
Putting all the technical terms aside, SanDisk Extreme II has got what it takes in terms of hardware to outperform many other SSDs in the market.
Tiered Caching
Test Bench
In this review, we will be pairing the SanDisk Extreme II 240GB SSD together with an AMD 990FX system to see if this new generation of SanDisk SSD works well on the aging AMD platform.
- SanDisk Extreme II 240GB (Test)
- AMD FX-8350 @ 4GHz
- ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0
- Samsung 1600MHz DDR3 Black Knight RAM
- AMD HD7790
- Samsung 840 120GB (OS)
Of course, for a top of the line SSD, we definitely would want to compare it to the known fastest drive on the market aka Samsung 840 Pro which uses a Samsung Controller and Samsung NAND.
Benchmarks
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| SanDisk Extreme II 240GB PC Mark 8 Benchmark |
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| Samsung 840 PRO 256GB PC Mark 8 Benchmark |
Conclusion
Does SanDisk Extreme II live up to its name? Most definitely. Although sequential read and write speeds may not be as high as the Samsung 840 Pro drive, it does not really matter as sequential read and write speeds does not model real world situations. On the other than, SanDisk performs better that its arch rival in the sections where it matters most, particularly at small sized data transfers. Read and write speeds are shown to be better than 840 Pro most of the time. Current day operating system uses small access blocks and having such quick performance on small data size transfers will allow users to see a significant improvement. Thanks to its tiered caching technology, write speeds are also marginally better than 840 Pro. This is apparent when both drives were tested in PCMark 8, where Samsung 840 Pro performs surprisingly much slower than SanDisk Extreme II.
In terms of performance, we think that SanDisk Extreme II is on par with Samsung 840 Pro. There were times when Extreme II performed better than 840 Pro and likewise for 840 Pro in terms of raw performance.
SanDisk Extreme II 240GB is a little cheaper than Samsung 840 Pro at 390SGD (840 Pro at 399SGD). If you are looking for a nasty SSD for the ultimate performance desktop build, definitely take a look at SanDisk Extreme II which also comes with a whopping 5 year limited warranty.
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