SanDisk Focusing More On Desktop and Mobile SATA SSDs, Extreme II Series Tested

MojoKid writes "Odds are, if you've purchased anything that uses Flash memory in the last 20 years or so, you already own a piece of SanDisk technology. The company has been in Flash storage since the late '80s and manufactures products used in everything from smartphones to digital cameras. Even though it enjoys a long history in the Flash memory business, SanDisk is perhaps not as well known for its Solid State Drive (SSD) solutions for desktop and mobile PCs. However, SanDisk recently expanded their product stack with new, high-performance SSDs that leverage the company's own NAND Flash memory and Marvell's popular 88SSS9187 controller. The new drives are SanDisk's Extreme II family of SSDs targeted performance enthusiasts, workstations professionals and gamers. The initial line-up of drives consists of 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB models. Performance specifications for the three drives come in at 545MB/s – 550MB/s for reads with write performance from 340MB/s to 510MB/s, depending on density. In the benchmarks, SanDisk's Extreme II SSD showed it has the chops to hang with some of the fastest drives on the market from Samsung, Corsair and OCZ."

Comments

you've got to be kidding me

[Trepidity]

This blurb could not possibly have been written by a regular human interested in technology, unless there is a SanDisk fanclub I was previously unaware of.

Re:you've got to be kidding me

[mcrbids]

As somebody closely following the development of SSD technology (that we use for our database servers) I would have to respectfully disagree.

You see, our results testing SSDs against PostgreSQL 9.1 showed that SSDs improved performance by at least 90%. In other words, queries, particularly the large, nasty, 10-table joins with combined inner, outter, and meta-table joins that our vertical application is rife with, take 10% or less time to run. That result isn't just dramatic, it's a game-changer. But the truth is that even that isn't enough. Being able to saturate a 6 Gbps SATA III link in a random access read-load is fine and dandy, but write performance is also a very big deal, especially since our system is highly transactional and transaction wait states are painful.

In short, unlike CPUs, SSD technology is still immature enough that every bit of good news counts quite a bit.

Endurance

[fnj]

Personally I couldn't care less if the write throughput is 300, 400 or 500 MBps, but the write endurance of 80 TB, combined with the pseudo-SLC intermediate cache look pretty promising for home use. Intel 335 only specs 18 TB endurance.

Re:Endurance

[0123456]

I can't vouch for the modern SSDs, but I've had an X25-M in my netbook for years, it's used every day, and it's now reporting that it's down to 99% of its write capacity. At that rate the netbook will be in a museum long before the SSD dies.

Re:Endurance

[fnj]

The X-25M had a write endurance of 7.5 TB for the 80 GB, and 15 TB for the 160 GB. If you've got the 160 and write an average of 100 MB per day, that's only 0.18 TB in 5 years, or barely more than 1% of the endurance. If on the other hand you wrote 10 GB a day (about two DVDs' worth), that would be 18 TB, and the drive would be likely shot. An HDD has infinite endurance. It can die from various failure modes, but not from "using up" the magnetic storage medium.

It completely depends on how much data you write.

Re:Price per GB still a showstopper

[TerminaMorte]

You might pay the extra $ for your laptop computer, in order to save power and lower the risk of failure due to dropping.

I know I'd never go back for my laptop, personally