Legit Storage Reviews

SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB SSD Review

Manufacturer: SanDisk
Product: SDSSDHP-256G-G25
Date: Mon, Jan 07, 2013 - 08:00 AM
Written By: Joe Evans -
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Inside the Ultra Plus

Opening the drive required digging out the four screws which were hidden beneath the rear label.

SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB Opened

The surprisingly diminutive PCB we found inside is held by two further screws with some thermal padding behind it.

SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB PCB

On one side of the PCB we see just two NAND chips out of the four on board.

SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB NAND

Looking closely, we see the 19nm eX2 ABL MLC chips are branded as SanDisk and are each 64GB in density for 256GB total on board.

SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB PCB

On the other side, we find the remaining two NAND modules along with the controller and cache.

SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB SF-2281 Cache

Thanks to the thermal padding, the lettering on the cache and controller are a little hard to make out. However, we can see enough to tell this is a Samsung DDR2 DRAM chip at 128MB capacity.

SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB SF-2281 Controller

This is the first time we've seen the Marvell 88SS9175 SATA 6Gb/s capable controller and so far it seems very similar to the 9174 chip. It does a nice job of moving data quickly without the need for compression to boost performance; however, it does rely on a cache to buffer data as needed which sets it apart from the SandForce drives. It supports TRIM and idle garbage collection to keep things humming along and uses an eight channel architecture.

Next Page - Test System & Comparison Drives


Review Index
Page 1 - SanDisk Ultra Plus Marvell Powered SSD
Page 2 - Inside the Ultra Plus
Page 3 - Test System & Comparison Drives
Page 4 - ATTO & AS-SSD Benchmarks
Page 5 - CrystalDiskMark and Anvil IOPS
Page 6 - Real World Copy & Boot Tests
Page 7 - Final Thoughts & Conclusions