SanDisk Extreme II Series 120GB, 240GB and 480GB SSD Review

Exteme II The Max

It was June of last year when we had a look at the first edition of the SanDisk Extreme SSDs which was powered by what was at the time, the hottest SSD controller on the planet – the SandForce SF-2281. Times have definitely changed and while the SF-2281 controller is still very much a popular controller, there are a number compelling options available now. With that, SanDisk has decided to change things up a bit with their high performance Extreme II drives and go with the latest Marvell 88SS9187 controller which we first saw on the Crucial M500 review. It puts out some really nice numbers and in fact SanDisk has even stated that the Extreme II drives are the fastest retail drives they’ve outed to date.

We were fortunate enough to get our hands on all three available capacities SanDisk is offering 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB. All of them see an overall performance increase over the first generation Extreme drives with the increases most pronounced on data that’s incompressible which we’ll see in our benchmarks. They are all also covered with a robust 5-year warranty which equals the best on the market that we could find and have a MTBF of 2,000,000 hours.

SanDisk Extreme II Series SSD Specifications and Features:

Capacity	Notebook Bundle	Desktop Bundle	MSRP
120 GB	SDSSDXP-120G-G25	SDSSDXP-120G-G26	$129.99
240 GB	SDSSDXP-240G-G25	SDSSDXP-240G-G26	$229.99
480 GB	SDSSDXP-480G-G25	SDSSDXP-480G-G26	$439.99

Specification:	120GB	240GB	480GB
Controller:	Marvell 88SS9187 SSD processor
Max Seq Read:	550MB/s	550MB/s	545MB/s
Max Seq Write:	340MB/s	510MB/s	500MB/s
Max IOPS Read:	91K	91K	95K
Max IOPS Write:	74K	78K	75K
Active Power:	0.22W	0.22W	0.24W
Max Read Operating:	2.9W	3.5W	3.2W
Max Write Operating:	3.4W	5.0W	5.0W
Slumber:	0.10W	0.10W	0.10W
MTBF:	2.0M Hours	2.0M Hours	2.0M Hours
Endurance:	>80 TBW	>80 TBW	>80 TBW
Weight:	54g	57g	57g
Size:	7.0 mm x 69.85mm x 100.5mm

• SATA 6 Gb/s compliant: Backwards compliant to SATA 3 Gb/s & SATA 1.5 Gb/s
• ATA Command Set ACS-2
• NCQ support up to queue depth = 32
• Support for TRIM
• S.M.A.R.T. feature supported
• Advanced Flash Management:

• nCache™ – Non Volatile Write Cache
• Dynamic and Static Wear-leveling
• Bad Block Management
• Background Garbage Collection

Advanced features:

• Tiered caching – Volatile and non-volatile cache
• Supports multi stream – improves user experience in multitasking systems
• Minimal write amplification – increases endurance and performance

Support for Thermal throttling:

• Performance will be throttled in the event junction temperature of critical components is measured to be exceeding the maximum allowable for the product

The notebook bundle comes with a spacer shim for more fitment options in a variety of equipment, changing the drive height from 7mm to 9.5mm.

The desktop bundle comes with a SATA 6Gbps data cable and a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter plate as well as the necessary screws for affixing to the plate. We’ll have a look inside each drive now.