I always like a good review, but I'm finding SSD benchmarks difficult to respect when the real-world difference between this drive and the MX100 will be invisible to most users.
I agree, Ferrari's vs Lamborghini's. Anybody coming from a hard drive or even a last-gen SSD (like an Intel X25) isn't going to notice the difference between a $100 MX100 and a $200 Sandisk Extreme Pro
No one will notice... except people that can and do distinguish between Ferraris and Lambos. I would imagine that someone that could tell the difference between a WD Velociraptor and a Seagate Barracuda would notice the difference between these two drives. Different users have different needs, that should be obvious.
The issue is that many power users *think* they can tell the difference, but fail to in blind tests. This has been proven true frequently, usually in relation to more subjective domains like audio, but it applies everywhere. Sit a user at two computers, one overclocked 5%, one not, and it's likely not a single power user will be able to tell without a FPS meter or perf test result.
Depends on what operation is boosted by 5%. If 5% allows you to maintain solid vsync vs dips, then you sure as heck will be able to tell. If 5% is the difference between completing 5% more editing projects in the same amount of time, then people who spend more will see a benefit. There's always a case to be made for measurable improvements.
I'm sorry, but the audiophile straw man doesn't apply here.
It's entirely synthetic, even if derived from real trace data.
As I understand it, the trace is replayed as fast as possible. In the real world, the trace probably would have been collected over a period of hours or days. In those time frames, different levels of near instantaneous is the same if it's too quick for human perception. Consider the microcontroller controlling your washing machine. It does all it needs to do fast enough, that adding a 10000% faster CPU won;t make your washing clean any quicker.
Plus, in the real world, other factors come into play. Had the trace been replayed in real time (as in takes as long to replay as to collect, pauses and all) different drives will do things like background GC, which will improve performance of the next burst of activity. A drive that takes 162% as long to replay the trace at full speed may complete the real time trace within milliseconds of the faster drive. Result, no perceptible difference to the user.
Maximum idle time (i.e. when QD=0) is set to 25 seconds, otherwise the trace is played as it was collected. Sure that's still not the same as playing it back in real time but it's still quite a bit of time for the SSD to do GC.
Where can I find these 10000% washing machines? I have been tracking this market for years, and I am so tired of incremental 5% gains on washing machine silicon. WE WANT INNOVATION!!!
Its discussions like this that make it hard for me to get a feel for whether it would matter to me or not.
On the one hand, 162% sounds plenty substantial. I do not want to spend 162% more immersion-breaking time twiddling my thumbs waiting for the next level to load, let alone 162% more time to get through a compile so I can meet my next deadline.
On the other hand, waiting 1/1,000th of a second does not actually sound any faster to me than waiting 1/4,000th of a second (these are the "average service times" in the benchmark), because I know my personal threshold for perceiving laggy response kicks in at around 0.1 seconds.
So where does this leave me? Not sure really but in the case of doubt it probably goes to spend more. The extra $100-$200 of potential hardware savings would be eaten up quickly in my time to research it much further, to end up ordering & installing & migrating to another drive sooner than I otherwise would have, or if I really did end up twiddling my thumbs more.
But never fear MyrddinE, I'm still not buying the 99.8% pure unicorn dust super connect audio cables.
There are plenty of use cases where every little helps - a 5% overclock, assuming linear scaling, would shave ~8.5 minutes off a 3 hour video transcoding task for example.
See but actual users do not do "blind tests" they do actual tests for their servers to see what is better. You dont need to feel the difference between 5 and 10 to know what number is higher.
In many cases, you are correct. But if you were just teetering near sufficient performance, a 5% performance increase to stay solidly just above 30 fps, the difference will suddenly become very obvious to perceive.
Thanks for a nice review. Do you know if Sandisk is going to release an mSata version of this ? Sadly, there isn't a good msata ssd > 240 GB capacity and with good performance consistency in the market right now.... Regards
I know what you mean because when I built my mITX I think the only drive I could find was the ocz nocti 128GB. If I was going to upgrade it I would go with a Samsung 840 evo but mSATA isn't worth investing into at this point with M.2 arrival IMO.
Well, I am just a simple architect, and probably I am not representative of Anandtech userbase, but, why do you feel hardware encryption is so important? Am I missing something? Should I be worried that my hard drives are not encrypted?
I'm wondering about the focus on encryption too. I have a Samsung Evo in my Sandy Bridge desktop machine and it supposedly supports this Opal hardware encryption. Trouble is, I have no idea how to enable it. Apparently, I can set a disk password but I see no option for that in my computer's firmware. Someone mentioned enabling BitLocker in Windows 8.1, but I get an error message saying my system doesn't have a TPM chip. I have zero idea how to go about enabling it on Linux, but I suppose dm-crypt for software encryption should work just fine.
I don't get it either. If your file system is not encrypted, then simply plugin the ssd to another machine and get all the data. If your file system is encrypted, then what does it matter if the hardware is encrypted? I think they just offer it because it costs them almost nothing to have a hardware encryption chip, and enterprises like buzzwords.
@reloaded, you don't have to enable it, it's always on. The password is on the controller, if you destroy that, the data could not be recuperated. But why would you destroy the controller and not the rest of the drive is beyond me.
Your BIOS has to support disk passwords, and you have to enable it. For drives with hardware encryption, the ATA/disk/whatever password has to be known to get at the encryption key, otherwise it's just left at some default that every machine can read.
Hardware encryption means that the encryption is done by the hardware rather than software. The benefit is that because it's done at the device-level, it doesn't consume the host CPU like software encryption and it's more secure.
While SSDs often encrypt all data that is written to them, you still have to enable encryption from the host to ensure that the data can't be accessed by a third party. Otherwise the SSD think that any machine (and user) is allowed to access the data.
Good point, personally encryption at the hardware level is not important to me. I find common sense and protection of property out weighs the continuous management overhead of encryption keys especially for a developer like me who regularly and repeatedly reformats partitions.
Especially when working with cloudbased/corporate share online only storage. I do wonder however, I have a samsung 840 pro (256GIB version) I have 2 vertex4's (256 GiB version). I have on many occasions rebuilt/reformatted and transplanted my SSD's from one machine to the next. I don't know if I have to explicitly enable/disable the feature on the SSD, but IMHO, if I could easily read the SSD contents simply by moving it to another computer, then what ever encryption is on the drive is simply not effective.
The Samsung (and probably the Vertex) encrypts (just by the nature of how it works) everything that is written to the drive as a matter of course. Unless you set an ATA password in your BIOS, though, the password/encryption key/whatever is left 'blank' or default or whatever, so it is readable by any other motherboard. If you set an ATA password, though, that changes the encryption key, you will probably have to wipe the drive to enable it, and then the drive will not be readable in another system unless you also configure it for ATA passwords as well, and then type it in.
10 years warranty. Love it. L.O.V.E. I.T. Thank you, SanDisk, for setting this trend. I'll surely wait, but I think this is exactly what I need for my next build. 10 years... OMFG! Drool!
It's a great warranty but I think ssds potential failure points are less than an hdd. (my speculation).
When I saw that though it definitely peaked my interest. Would have purchased this drive if it had been an option as that warranty would definitely make me feel better as I hold onto my hardware for a long time.
I'd still choose the MX100 over this any day. It's not like these drives are falling apart everywhere. And if you save the price difference between these drives you could use it to buy something significantly better in a few years, should the MX100 have failed by then (I wouldn't expect it to).
How exactly is this a no compromise drive when it doesn't offer encryption and it doesn't offer capaciyor-based power loss protection? Data integrity and security seem like pretty big compromises. Or is the SLC buffer seen as a sufficient substitute for a capacitor-based solution?
It is a no compromise drive for the market it targets -- the consumer market. Few / no consumer-targeted drives have capacitors; pretty much all such drives are targeting the server market, such as Intel's SSD DC3700. Very few consumer drives offer TCG Opal, but some do, e.g. Samsung's 840 EVO.
The author specifically mentioned disappointment at the lack of encryption, and the author, unlike you specifically used the phrase "only no compromise high-end SSD in the market" while simultaneously declaring Intel's 730 SSD, OCZ's Vector 150, and Samsung 840 Pro as being in that same "high-end" market. So it seemed rightfully bizarre to simultaneously proclaim it as a "no compromises" drive given the other drives the author also compared it to that are supposedly in the same market.
Also, while you're right that few consumer-targeted drives have capacitors, the Crucial M500 does. And honestly, capacitors don't cost that much, but it's no wonder Intel's happy to let all of the other manufacturers fight over "razor-thin" margins.
Because the Extreme Pro is the only high-end SSD without the compromises that the three other SSDs have. Intel SSD 730 and OCZ Vector 150 don't support any form of low-power states and are thus not suitable for laptops. The 840 Pro, on the other hand, lacks IO consistency. All three drives are in the same high-end performance market, thus I'm comparing the Extreme Pro with them.
Crucial's drives have capacitors that provide power loss protection but they are the only drives along with Intel's SSD 730. However, you can get away without capacitors if the firmware is designed not to rely too much on the DRAM cache. I would certainly like to see OEMs use capacitors more in consumer-grade drives but on the other hand, I'm not sure if I consider it to be that big of a deal. We don't have a proper way to test power losses, so I don't want to give too much value to a feature that may or may not be needed.
There's still a DRAM cache though, so I'd like to see a torture test on SanDisk's drive before I could be confident. But I'm aware that's potentially bricking the drive so I can understand why you might not be able to do that.
I agree that what SanDisk has done seems like it would help mitigate the need for a capacitor, but I just can't be confident about it until some tests are done.
Can anyone recommend a simple Windows utility for profiling your storage usage? I'm picturing something that runs in the background with an icon in the system tray I could mouseover to get a quick take on average daily data written, QD histogram, maybe read/write and/or size mix. It'd be great to be able to take a look at it when I'm reading articles like this to figure out which stats matter most to me.
Encryption is always going to slow down your drive. After all, it takes a lot of brute computation to do encryption.
The biggest problem of hardware encryption is that you don't have the freedom to select your own encryption algorithm. For example, if the hardware encryption method is compromised then you are screwed if you rely on it.
I would rather keep whole disk encryption at the OS level.
Encryption in hardware is easy (at least easier than software) and probably adds very little in terms of latency and power budget. AES is just multiple rounds of XOR, ROM lookups and bit mixing. Quite easy to do in hardware quickly.
AES-128 (the minimum AES level) is a long way from being considered broken.
Thanks for the review!! I am still going strong with my Extreme II and have yet to have any issues with it. Windows is still running fantastic, since the very first install on this drive. My dad's Extreme II is also running strong. I felt like I was taking a bit of a risk with an unknown when I got a somewhat less popular drive, but the current sale price back then was unbeatable, and to this day I have no regrets. Nice to see they are still coming to town and packing a punch!
I was wondering why there was no mention of block size. Do you set the block size on these drives? If so, does it make a difference in the performance?
What's going to keep PCIe SSD adoption low is the sheer number of systems that you can't just drop it in and boot in it's current state. What it will likely take is for the drives to ship with a legacy mode that says to BIOS "yeah... I'm a SATA RAID controller with a bunch of drives attached...". The latest EFI updates for NVE and Windows 8.1 are a great step forward though.
Can somebody explain to me why in most SSD reviews the lack of encryption support is criticised? Of course you want encryption for your data, but why in the drive? It's a black box implementation that you can't fully trust or update, unlike the plenty of open source software solutions. Especially when talking about high performance drives, I'd expect the CPU to have hardware acceleration for encryption, so speed shouldn't be an issue afaict. Can anybody shed some light on this?
I think I need to do an article that better describes the usefulness of TCG Opal because there are some security advantages as well. I admit that we probably haven't done the best to fully address this, but hopefully we can still fix it :)
Thanks for your reply. I'd love to see the article. I couldn't see from that linked article whether the CPU has AES NI or equivalent, my point is that I can't see why encrypting the data with such a CPU is inferior to drive side encryption. I'm looking forward to the article!
@Kristian Vättö If you still can, could you please post somewhere some screenshots (preferably) or write down the description/name for all SMART attributes for this drive from the SanDisk SSD Dashboard under the SMART tab? SanDisk doesn't readily provide this information to the public, and if you could fulfill this request, it would get easier to make sense of those attributes with other popular third party drive SMART information tools such as CrystalDiskInfo.
This is what I got on my Extreme II SSD from that SanDisk SSD Dashboard. As far as I know the Extreme PRO has more/different SMART parameters, which is interesting since the controller should be the same:
5 / 05 - Retired Block Count 9 / 09 - Power On Hours 12 / 0C - Device Power Cycle Count 166 / A6 - Min W/E Cycle 167 / A7 - Min Bad Block/Die 168 / A8 - Maximum Erase Cycle 169 / A9 - Total Bad Block 171 / AB - Program Fail Count 172 / AC - Erase Fail Count 173 / AD - Average Erase Cycle 174 / AE - Unexpected Power Loss Count 187 / BB - Reported Uncorrectable Errors 194 / C2 - Current Temperature 212 / D4 - SATA PHY Error 230 / E6 - Percentage Total P/E Count XX.YY 232 / E8 - Spare Blocks Remaining 233 / E9 - Total GB Written to NAND 241 / F1 - Total GB Written 242 / F2 - Total GB Read 243 / F3 - [?]
My drives are currently at my friend's place as he does the photography for me (I don't have a DSLR), so I can't do this right now. However, I'll swing by his place next week at the latest, so feel free to remind me via email ([email protected]) in a week or so if I forget :)
Ok, I will. FYI, I plan to submit that information to the CrystalDiskInfo author. After I sent him SMART attribute information for the Extreme II he promised to implement it in the next program version (so that they will not appear as "vendor specific" anymore).
What happens to performance consistency if the drive has a few partitions?
Say you have 50GB for Windows, 30GB for Linux, 10GB for Swap - if you use the remaining space as a partition will you then get max performance? or will the performance be reduced regardless because partitioning has the same effect as leaving spare area?
Not to pick nits, but "SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD (240GB, 480GB & 960GB) Review: The Fastest Just Got Faster" seems to me to be a bit of hyperbole unsupported by the facts... A paid review, perhaps?
The Extreme II was already the fastest SATA SSD, so in that sense "the fastest just got faster" because the Extreme Pro is essentially a tweaked Extreme II. I know we don't often use such headlines but I think in this case it's justified. Of course, feedback is always welcome -- do you prefer the general headlines instead?
That´s sarcasm right? M.2 PCI-E ssd are already 3x faster and with nvme, alot more.
Comment on: "All in all, the Extreme Pro is the only no compromise high-end SSD in the market." I would say high-end SATA SSD, this extreme pro is going to look like slow drive in 2015 with all the M.2 craze. So price is all that much more important factor, your going to pay hefty premium when there are multitudes faster products coming(and existing) and SATA/ACHI is capping your performance. Sata is dead, long live the new Sata :)
Im hoping my Z97 built this summer boots from M.2(or heck even pcie), any chance of getting article about that?
I get the enthusiasm for the increase in bandwidth by going PCIe, but there are other constraints for some of us. What about those of us that already have all of their PCIe slots crammed full to the brim with GPUs and Sound cards and stuff? Maybe vendors can put internal PCIe slots in without the need for using a chassis slot. After all, most of them just have a back plate with nothing right? Or something that lets me use a riser cable and mount it elsewhere instead of burning a precious one of my back panel slots.
Kristian, just curious, why did the Vector 512GB top the IOMeter Sequential Write table? Just seems a bit of an oddity given where it ends up in all the other tables.
Btw, your AS-SSD tables are amusing in this regard; I ran AS-SSD on my Vector 512GB, it gave 516.94 seq. read, 502.78 seq. write (topping both tables), overall score of 1091. Interestingly, although my Vector 128GB drops its seq. write to 386, the seq. read still stays healthy at 515.18. I do like the Vector series, they work very well. I bought a Vector-150 128GB; it's seq. write is 10% higher, but the 4K numbers are lower, resulting in a reduced overall score (989 vs. 1040).
The highest overall score I've had so far was 1147 from an 840 Pro 512GB.
In case anyone missed it,the Sandisk Extreme Pro prices listed on the last page of the article are not real prices because the items were out of stock at the time the reviewer pulled the prices from Newegg. Now the 240 and 480 GB models are in stock for $270 and $400, respectively. All three models are in stock at Amazon.com with prices of $240, $430, and $700.
The SSD market is looking like what we often see in the CPU market, with large price premiums for the fastest models. I won't be buying a Sandisk Extreme Pro, but there probably are people who could really benefit from the performance.
"SanDisk is turning out to be a very dangerous player in the client SSD space. With nearly perfect vertical integration model (they just lack client controller silicon and DRAM), SanDisk has the ability to put against Samsung and Intel who have traditionally held the performance crown."
They actually do have their own controller. The U110 and the Standard (and maybe more) use Sandisk's own controller. Granted these are low end.
Hi, shouldn't writes be slower than reads in drives, more so in SSDs? For eg, on http://anandtech.com/show/8170/sandisk-extreme-pro... sequential read for the Extreme Pro 960GB is 438 MBps while sequential write is 371.4. But in the case of random read(98.5) vs write(257MBps for QD=1), write is faster. Why is that the case?
Well, I don't understand very well how or why the SanDisk Extreme Pro and SanDisk Extreme II finish in front in AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 when it seemed to me that Samsung 840 Pro outperforms the SanDisk Extreme II by some distance (according to other websites) in terms of 4K write I/O operations. I saw 90K against 30K for the SanDisk in one test and 90K against 60K in another.
Is it the mix of both types of operation (read/write) that makes the difference or is the AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 using more intensively non-4K read/write operations where perhaps the SanDisk SSDs perform better ? And would it be possible to have some results for the Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb in AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 please if the SSD is still available for testing ? :) Thanks :)
And finally, I hesitate between the SanDisk Extreme Pro 256Gb (150€ here in France) and the Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb (165€). 10 year warranty sound really good but which one is better in terms of pure performance ? Which one should I take ?
I don't understand. In this review it says that the Sandisk Extreme Pro is the fastest SSD available yet when you go to the "Bench" area of this website, pick the Extreme Pro and put it up against something like the Samsung 840 Pro, the Samsung wins in many of the benchmarks. Even when put up against the Sandisk Extreme II the newer Extremem Pro loses out in many of the marks. I'm just looking for the all around fastest 240/256GB SSD but it seems every site I go to has a different opinion.
Some people complain about real-world difference between ssd drives (because drives are fast enough). Nah, thay arent :). I can tell that my 240GB hyperx is better than most 7k rpm drives, but its a turtle wgen compared to ramdrive. I cutted off 25GB partition from 32Gb of total memory to do some special things and i see huge difference. Installation a windows 2012 r2 with sql 2012 on hyper-v? Its a matter of minutes (i7 3770 @ 4.1). Benchmarks? Who needs them when you have powershell [get-counter -Counter '\process(_total)\io data operations/sec']. I used ramdrives on dell r820 filled with ram and can tell this: the slowest part of pc/server is and will be cpu :).
Hi Hardware Community, I know this article is quite outdated right now, nevertheless the actual topic of the authors "Final Words" bug me right now. Especially now that enough time for longtime-endurance tests has passed.
Anyway, I can´t choose between the Samsung EVO 850 1TB v2 (289€) and die SanDisk Extreme 960GB (281€). So pricewise the "Pro" is even cheaper right now compared to the Samsung. But there are some obvious differences:
- TLC 3D V-NAND vs. MLC Planar - 5 years vs. 10 years warranty - 150 TBW vs. 80 TBW - higher Peak vs. consistency - Samsung Bugging vs. sudden death drives
My usage: - Client for everything: gaming, programming, office, multimedia - averything - gonna split it in system and data-partition - gonne be in laptop that´s used as desktop - battery is wasted, so no concern about power consumption
So, usually I use hardware until it´s broken so meaning about 8-10 years. Still I want steady performance without sudden decline in speed like with the EVO 840 :C I´d be really glad, if you could tell me your opinion on this :)
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fackamato - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
Nice. Time to replace the old Intel 320 in RAID0 perhaps.MikeMurphy - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
I always like a good review, but I'm finding SSD benchmarks difficult to respect when the real-world difference between this drive and the MX100 will be invisible to most users.Samus - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
I agree, Ferrari's vs Lamborghini's. Anybody coming from a hard drive or even a last-gen SSD (like an Intel X25) isn't going to notice the difference between a $100 MX100 and a $200 Sandisk Extreme Pronathanddrews - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
No one will notice... except people that can and do distinguish between Ferraris and Lambos. I would imagine that someone that could tell the difference between a WD Velociraptor and a Seagate Barracuda would notice the difference between these two drives. Different users have different needs, that should be obvious.MyrddinE - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
The issue is that many power users *think* they can tell the difference, but fail to in blind tests. This has been proven true frequently, usually in relation to more subjective domains like audio, but it applies everywhere. Sit a user at two computers, one overclocked 5%, one not, and it's likely not a single power user will be able to tell without a FPS meter or perf test result.nathanddrews - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Depends on what operation is boosted by 5%. If 5% allows you to maintain solid vsync vs dips, then you sure as heck will be able to tell. If 5% is the difference between completing 5% more editing projects in the same amount of time, then people who spend more will see a benefit. There's always a case to be made for measurable improvements.I'm sorry, but the audiophile straw man doesn't apply here.
Chaser - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
A 5 % performance difference with selective benchmarks using higher end SSD WON'T be noticed in real world user experiences. No need to apologize.Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
5%? The difference between 240GB Extreme Pro and 256GB MX100 is more like 162% in the Storage Bench 2013...http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1240?vs=122...
Bear in mind that that's real-world IOs played back on the drive, so it's not as synthetic as e.g. Iometer tests are.
TheWrongChristian - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link
It's entirely synthetic, even if derived from real trace data.As I understand it, the trace is replayed as fast as possible. In the real world, the trace probably would have been collected over a period of hours or days. In those time frames, different levels of near instantaneous is the same if it's too quick for human perception. Consider the microcontroller controlling your washing machine. It does all it needs to do fast enough, that adding a 10000% faster CPU won;t make your washing clean any quicker.
Plus, in the real world, other factors come into play. Had the trace been replayed in real time (as in takes as long to replay as to collect, pauses and all) different drives will do things like background GC, which will improve performance of the next burst of activity. A drive that takes 162% as long to replay the trace at full speed may complete the real time trace within milliseconds of the faster drive. Result, no perceptible difference to the user.
Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link
Maximum idle time (i.e. when QD=0) is set to 25 seconds, otherwise the trace is played as it was collected. Sure that's still not the same as playing it back in real time but it's still quite a bit of time for the SSD to do GC.ninjag - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
Where can I find these 10000% washing machines? I have been tracking this market for years, and I am so tired of incremental 5% gains on washing machine silicon. WE WANT INNOVATION!!!brucek2 - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Its discussions like this that make it hard for me to get a feel for whether it would matter to me or not.On the one hand, 162% sounds plenty substantial. I do not want to spend 162% more immersion-breaking time twiddling my thumbs waiting for the next level to load, let alone 162% more time to get through a compile so I can meet my next deadline.
On the other hand, waiting 1/1,000th of a second does not actually sound any faster to me than waiting 1/4,000th of a second (these are the "average service times" in the benchmark), because I know my personal threshold for perceiving laggy response kicks in at around 0.1 seconds.
So where does this leave me? Not sure really but in the case of doubt it probably goes to spend more. The extra $100-$200 of potential hardware savings would be eaten up quickly in my time to research it much further, to end up ordering & installing & migrating to another drive sooner than I otherwise would have, or if I really did end up twiddling my thumbs more.
But never fear MyrddinE, I'm still not buying the 99.8% pure unicorn dust super connect audio cables.
mickulty - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
There are plenty of use cases where every little helps - a 5% overclock, assuming linear scaling, would shave ~8.5 minutes off a 3 hour video transcoding task for example.UltraTech79 - Sunday, June 29, 2014 - link
See but actual users do not do "blind tests" they do actual tests for their servers to see what is better. You dont need to feel the difference between 5 and 10 to know what number is higher.n13L5 - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
In many cases, you are correct. But if you were just teetering near sufficient performance, a 5% performance increase to stay solidly just above 30 fps, the difference will suddenly become very obvious to perceive.UltraTech79 - Sunday, June 29, 2014 - link
Yes. No one would notice......Except the sort of people that would read these kinds of articles. Your logic is a failure.
vaayu64 - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
Thanks for a nice review. Do you know if Sandisk is going to release an mSata version of this ?Sadly, there isn't a good msata ssd > 240 GB capacity and with good performance consistency in the market right now....
Regards
457R4LDR34DKN07 - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
I know what you mean because when I built my mITX I think the only drive I could find was the ocz nocti 128GB. If I was going to upgrade it I would go with a Samsung 840 evo but mSATA isn't worth investing into at this point with M.2 arrival IMO.vaayu64 - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
The 840 evo msata is without doubt a very nice ssd, but TRIM is not supported on that one.ijozic - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Where did you get that (mis)information from?vaayu64 - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Look for the review here on anandtech....Shiitaki - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
Actually, Samsung sells the 840 EVO up to 1TB in a msata.apertotes - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
Well, I am just a simple architect, and probably I am not representative of Anandtech userbase, but, why do you feel hardware encryption is so important? Am I missing something? Should I be worried that my hard drives are not encrypted?r3loaded - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
I'm wondering about the focus on encryption too. I have a Samsung Evo in my Sandy Bridge desktop machine and it supposedly supports this Opal hardware encryption. Trouble is, I have no idea how to enable it. Apparently, I can set a disk password but I see no option for that in my computer's firmware. Someone mentioned enabling BitLocker in Windows 8.1, but I get an error message saying my system doesn't have a TPM chip. I have zero idea how to go about enabling it on Linux, but I suppose dm-crypt for software encryption should work just fine.andychow - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
I don't get it either. If your file system is not encrypted, then simply plugin the ssd to another machine and get all the data. If your file system is encrypted, then what does it matter if the hardware is encrypted? I think they just offer it because it costs them almost nothing to have a hardware encryption chip, and enterprises like buzzwords.@reloaded, you don't have to enable it, it's always on. The password is on the controller, if you destroy that, the data could not be recuperated. But why would you destroy the controller and not the rest of the drive is beyond me.
I personally don't see the point.
chiechien - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Your BIOS has to support disk passwords, and you have to enable it. For drives with hardware encryption, the ATA/disk/whatever password has to be known to get at the encryption key, otherwise it's just left at some default that every machine can read.Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Hardware encryption means that the encryption is done by the hardware rather than software. The benefit is that because it's done at the device-level, it doesn't consume the host CPU like software encryption and it's more secure.While SSDs often encrypt all data that is written to them, you still have to enable encryption from the host to ensure that the data can't be accessed by a third party. Otherwise the SSD think that any machine (and user) is allowed to access the data.
thomas-hrb - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
Good point, personally encryption at the hardware level is not important to me. I find common sense and protection of property out weighs the continuous management overhead of encryption keys especially for a developer like me who regularly and repeatedly reformats partitions.Especially when working with cloudbased/corporate share online only storage. I do wonder however, I have a samsung 840 pro (256GIB version) I have 2 vertex4's (256 GiB version). I have on many occasions rebuilt/reformatted and transplanted my SSD's from one machine to the next. I don't know if I have to explicitly enable/disable the feature on the SSD, but IMHO, if I could easily read the SSD contents simply by moving it to another computer, then what ever encryption is on the drive is simply not effective.
chiechien - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
The Samsung (and probably the Vertex) encrypts (just by the nature of how it works) everything that is written to the drive as a matter of course. Unless you set an ATA password in your BIOS, though, the password/encryption key/whatever is left 'blank' or default or whatever, so it is readable by any other motherboard. If you set an ATA password, though, that changes the encryption key, you will probably have to wipe the drive to enable it, and then the drive will not be readable in another system unless you also configure it for ATA passwords as well, and then type it in.hojnikb - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
I wonder why Sandisk didn't went with marvel *89 controller ?LtGoonRush - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
The only improvements are idle power consumption and support for Low-Power DDR3, and this isn't really a mobile-targeted drive.Oyster - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
10 years warranty. Love it. L.O.V.E. I.T. Thank you, SanDisk, for setting this trend. I'll surely wait, but I think this is exactly what I need for my next build.10 years... OMFG! Drool!
tential - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
It's a great warranty but I think ssds potential failure points are less than an hdd. (my speculation).When I saw that though it definitely peaked my interest. Would have purchased this drive if it had been an option as that warranty would definitely make me feel better as I hold onto my hardware for a long time.
MrSpadge - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
I'd still choose the MX100 over this any day. It's not like these drives are falling apart everywhere. And if you save the price difference between these drives you could use it to buy something significantly better in a few years, should the MX100 have failed by then (I wouldn't expect it to).nathanddrews - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
This is pretty awesome:http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-enduran...
havefunbob - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
that is really good testbinarycrusader - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
How exactly is this a no compromise drive when it doesn't offer encryption and it doesn't offer capaciyor-based power loss protection? Data integrity and security seem like pretty big compromises. Or is the SLC buffer seen as a sufficient substitute for a capacitor-based solution?BillyONeal - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
It is a no compromise drive for the market it targets -- the consumer market. Few / no consumer-targeted drives have capacitors; pretty much all such drives are targeting the server market, such as Intel's SSD DC3700. Very few consumer drives offer TCG Opal, but some do, e.g. Samsung's 840 EVO.binarycrusader - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
The author specifically mentioned disappointment at the lack of encryption, and the author, unlike you specifically used the phrase "only no compromise high-end SSD in the market" while simultaneously declaring Intel's 730 SSD, OCZ's Vector 150, and Samsung 840 Pro as being in that same "high-end" market. So it seemed rightfully bizarre to simultaneously proclaim it as a "no compromises" drive given the other drives the author also compared it to that are supposedly in the same market.Also, while you're right that few consumer-targeted drives have capacitors, the Crucial M500 does. And honestly, capacitors don't cost that much, but it's no wonder Intel's happy to let all of the other manufacturers fight over "razor-thin" margins.
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Because the Extreme Pro is the only high-end SSD without the compromises that the three other SSDs have. Intel SSD 730 and OCZ Vector 150 don't support any form of low-power states and are thus not suitable for laptops. The 840 Pro, on the other hand, lacks IO consistency. All three drives are in the same high-end performance market, thus I'm comparing the Extreme Pro with them.Crucial's drives have capacitors that provide power loss protection but they are the only drives along with Intel's SSD 730. However, you can get away without capacitors if the firmware is designed not to rely too much on the DRAM cache. I would certainly like to see OEMs use capacitors more in consumer-grade drives but on the other hand, I'm not sure if I consider it to be that big of a deal. We don't have a proper way to test power losses, so I don't want to give too much value to a feature that may or may not be needed.
binarycrusader - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Thanks, that explanation makes the comparison seems a lot more reasonable.By the way, NewEgg is selling the 480GB model for $379.99 today, which makes the Intel one slightly more appealing.
binarycrusader - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
There's still a DRAM cache though, so I'd like to see a torture test on SanDisk's drive before I could be confident. But I'm aware that's potentially bricking the drive so I can understand why you might not be able to do that.I agree that what SanDisk has done seems like it would help mitigate the need for a capacitor, but I just can't be confident about it until some tests are done.
brucek2 - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
Can anyone recommend a simple Windows utility for profiling your storage usage? I'm picturing something that runs in the background with an icon in the system tray I could mouseover to get a quick take on average daily data written, QD histogram, maybe read/write and/or size mix. It'd be great to be able to take a look at it when I'm reading articles like this to figure out which stats matter most to me.matthew5025 - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
I recommend diskmonhttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-sg/sysinternals/bb...
Essence_of_War - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
Wherein SanDisk, not content with already having the top data rate and service time in the Destroyer benchmark, takes the title back from themselves.I'm very impressed with their commitment to product quality.
Antronman - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
At 200USD for 240GB, I'm just not sold.2x HyperX 3K 120GB in your choice of RAID configuration and you've got it, for 40-50USD cheaper.
jameskatt - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Encryption is always going to slow down your drive. After all, it takes a lot of brute computation to do encryption.The biggest problem of hardware encryption is that you don't have the freedom to select your own encryption algorithm. For example, if the hardware encryption method is compromised then you are screwed if you rely on it.
I would rather keep whole disk encryption at the OS level.
TheWrongChristian - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link
Encryption in hardware is easy (at least easier than software) and probably adds very little in terms of latency and power budget. AES is just multiple rounds of XOR, ROM lookups and bit mixing. Quite easy to do in hardware quickly.AES-128 (the minimum AES level) is a long way from being considered broken.
SirKronan - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Thanks for the review!! I am still going strong with my Extreme II and have yet to have any issues with it. Windows is still running fantastic, since the very first install on this drive. My dad's Extreme II is also running strong. I felt like I was taking a bit of a risk with an unknown when I got a somewhat less popular drive, but the current sale price back then was unbeatable, and to this day I have no regrets. Nice to see they are still coming to town and packing a punch!uruturu - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Why don't you test the drives in storage bench 2011-2013 with 25% OP???Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Unfortunately the tool we use doesn't allow the LBA range to be limited.uruturu - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link
:( I think would have been a head-to-head between Sandisk Extreme Pro, Samsung 840 Pro and Corsair Neutron GTX...sheh - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
It's good to see also the lower capacity model performing well. I hope other manufacturers would do the same. But too bad there's no 120GB."SanDisk is betting that its target users will ... or the endurance limit will be hit after the warranty runs out"
Is the warranty not 10 years or 80TB, whichever comes first?
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Yes. The warranty will be voided if you exceed the 80TB write limit.hojnikb - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
wow, i never though there are products with 32!!! stacked dies.is there any specific product, that uses so much dies ?
prophet001 - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
I was wondering why there was no mention of block size. Do you set the block size on these drives? If so, does it make a difference in the performance?Demon-Xanth - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
What's going to keep PCIe SSD adoption low is the sheer number of systems that you can't just drop it in and boot in it's current state. What it will likely take is for the drives to ship with a legacy mode that says to BIOS "yeah... I'm a SATA RAID controller with a bunch of drives attached...". The latest EFI updates for NVE and Windows 8.1 are a great step forward though.zuiop - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Can somebody explain to me why in most SSD reviews the lack of encryption support is criticised? Of course you want encryption for your data, but why in the drive? It's a black box implementation that you can't fully trust or update, unlike the plenty of open source software solutions. Especially when talking about high performance drives, I'd expect the CPU to have hardware acceleration for encryption, so speed shouldn't be an issue afaict. Can anybody shed some light on this?Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Software encryption adds unnecessary overhead and thus degrades performance:http://www.anandtech.com/show/6891/hardware-accele...
I think I need to do an article that better describes the usefulness of TCG Opal because there are some security advantages as well. I admit that we probably haven't done the best to fully address this, but hopefully we can still fix it :)
zuiop - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Thanks for your reply. I'd love to see the article. I couldn't see from that linked article whether the CPU has AES NI or equivalent, my point is that I can't see why encrypting the data with such a CPU is inferior to drive side encryption. I'm looking forward to the article!Solid State Brain - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
@Kristian VättöIf you still can, could you please post somewhere some screenshots (preferably) or write down the description/name for all SMART attributes for this drive from the SanDisk SSD Dashboard under the SMART tab?
SanDisk doesn't readily provide this information to the public, and if you could fulfill this request, it would get easier to make sense of those attributes with other popular third party drive SMART information tools such as CrystalDiskInfo.
This is what I got on my Extreme II SSD from that SanDisk SSD Dashboard. As far as I know the Extreme PRO has more/different SMART parameters, which is interesting since the controller should be the same:
5 / 05 - Retired Block Count
9 / 09 - Power On Hours
12 / 0C - Device Power Cycle Count
166 / A6 - Min W/E Cycle
167 / A7 - Min Bad Block/Die
168 / A8 - Maximum Erase Cycle
169 / A9 - Total Bad Block
171 / AB - Program Fail Count
172 / AC - Erase Fail Count
173 / AD - Average Erase Cycle
174 / AE - Unexpected Power Loss Count
187 / BB - Reported Uncorrectable Errors
194 / C2 - Current Temperature
212 / D4 - SATA PHY Error
230 / E6 - Percentage Total P/E Count XX.YY
232 / E8 - Spare Blocks Remaining
233 / E9 - Total GB Written to NAND
241 / F1 - Total GB Written
242 / F2 - Total GB Read
243 / F3 - [?]
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
My drives are currently at my friend's place as he does the photography for me (I don't have a DSLR), so I can't do this right now. However, I'll swing by his place next week at the latest, so feel free to remind me via email ([email protected]) in a week or so if I forget :)Solid State Brain - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Ok, I will. FYI, I plan to submit that information to the CrystalDiskInfo author. After I sent him SMART attribute information for the Extreme II he promised to implement it in the next program version (so that they will not appear as "vendor specific" anymore).Seville Orange - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
What happens to performance consistency if the drive has a few partitions?Say you have 50GB for Windows, 30GB for Linux, 10GB for Swap - if you use the remaining space as a partition will you then get max performance? or will the performance be reduced regardless because partitioning has the same effect as leaving spare area?
josquin - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
I also would like to get the answer to this question.croc123 - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Not to pick nits, but "SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD (240GB, 480GB & 960GB) Review: The Fastest Just Got Faster" seems to me to be a bit of hyperbole unsupported by the facts... A paid review, perhaps?Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
The Extreme II was already the fastest SATA SSD, so in that sense "the fastest just got faster" because the Extreme Pro is essentially a tweaked Extreme II. I know we don't often use such headlines but I think in this case it's justified. Of course, feedback is always welcome -- do you prefer the general headlines instead?MrX8503 - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
The tests show that it is the fastest. What kind of facts are you looking for?junky77 - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
That's what I wanna get 4 years from now, with M.2 interfacejuhatus - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
That´s sarcasm right? M.2 PCI-E ssd are already 3x faster and with nvme, alot more.Comment on:
"All in all, the Extreme Pro is the only no compromise high-end SSD in the market." I would say high-end SATA SSD, this extreme pro is going to look like slow drive in 2015 with all the M.2 craze. So price is all that much more important factor, your going to pay hefty premium when there are multitudes faster products coming(and existing) and SATA/ACHI is capping your performance. Sata is dead, long live the new Sata :)
Im hoping my Z97 built this summer boots from M.2(or heck even pcie), any chance of getting article about that?
Solix - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
I get the enthusiasm for the increase in bandwidth by going PCIe, but there are other constraints for some of us. What about those of us that already have all of their PCIe slots crammed full to the brim with GPUs and Sound cards and stuff? Maybe vendors can put internal PCIe slots in without the need for using a chassis slot. After all, most of them just have a back plate with nothing right? Or something that lets me use a riser cable and mount it elsewhere instead of burning a precious one of my back panel slots.457R4LDR34DKN07 - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
That is essentially what M.2 does...TelstarTOS - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Thanks. I really needed to see the performance of the new model before buying the old one on sale :)mapesdhs - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Kristian, just curious, why did the Vector 512GB top the IOMeter Sequential
Write table? Just seems a bit of an oddity given where it ends up in all the
other tables.
Btw, your AS-SSD tables are amusing in this regard; I ran AS-SSD on my
Vector 512GB, it gave 516.94 seq. read, 502.78 seq. write (topping both
tables), overall score of 1091. Interestingly, although my Vector 128GB
drops its seq. write to 386, the seq. read still stays healthy at 515.18.
I do like the Vector series, they work very well. I bought a Vector-150
128GB; it's seq. write is 10% higher, but the 4K numbers are lower,
resulting in a reduced overall score (989 vs. 1040).
The highest overall score I've had so far was 1147 from an 840 Pro 512GB.
(all done via Intel SATA3 on Z68)
Ian.
mapesdhs - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Caveat: in general prefer Samsung models for C-drives, for better long termconsistency. Here's the 840 250GB in my 3930K setup:
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/samsung_840_250GB_H...
Vectors are great for AE cache drives (ditto Vertex4), though my 2700K does
have a Vector 256GB for its C-drive; here's an HDTach:
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/OCZ_Vector_256GB_HD...
Pretty decent; not as quick/smooth as my 3930K's 840 250GB, though an AS-SSD
run is good:
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/OCZ_Vector_256GB_AS...
These Extreme Pros look interesting. I might get one to see how they fare for AE, etc.
Ian.
KAlmquist - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link
In case anyone missed it,the Sandisk Extreme Pro prices listed on the last page of the article are not real prices because the items were out of stock at the time the reviewer pulled the prices from Newegg. Now the 240 and 480 GB models are in stock for $270 and $400, respectively. All three models are in stock at Amazon.com with prices of $240, $430, and $700.The SSD market is looking like what we often see in the CPU market, with large price premiums for the fastest models. I won't be buying a Sandisk Extreme Pro, but there probably are people who could really benefit from the performance.
Xajel - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link
Interesting, the price went up..The 240GB model is cheaper in Amazon now compared to newegg
( A vs. NE ) : $229.99 vs. $269.95 or $0.958/GB vs. $1.125/GB
The 480GB model is cheaper in newegg
( A vs. NE ) : $429.99 vs. $399.95 or $0.896/GB vs. $0.833/GB
The 960GB model is not available in newegg.. but it cost $699.99 or $0.729/GB in Amazon
milli - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link
"SanDisk is turning out to be a very dangerous player in the client SSD space. With nearly perfect vertical integration model (they just lack client controller silicon and DRAM), SanDisk has the ability to put against Samsung and Intel who have traditionally held the performance crown."They actually do have their own controller. The U110 and the Standard (and maybe more) use Sandisk's own controller. Granted these are low end.
skarthikeyan - Saturday, June 21, 2014 - link
Hi, shouldn't writes be slower than reads in drives, more so in SSDs? For eg, on http://anandtech.com/show/8170/sandisk-extreme-pro... sequential read for the Extreme Pro 960GB is 438 MBps while sequential write is 371.4. But in the case of random read(98.5) vs write(257MBps for QD=1), write is faster. Why is that the case?skarthikeyan - Saturday, June 21, 2014 - link
Sorry, my comma broke the link, the correct link to that page is http://anandtech.com/show/8170/sandisk-extreme-pro...Highlanderix - Thursday, June 26, 2014 - link
Well, I don't understand very well how or why the SanDisk Extreme Pro and SanDisk Extreme II finish in front in AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 when it seemed to me that Samsung 840 Pro outperforms the SanDisk Extreme II by some distance (according to other websites) in terms of 4K write I/O operations. I saw 90K against 30K for the SanDisk in one test and 90K against 60K in another.Is it the mix of both types of operation (read/write) that makes the difference or is the AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 using more intensively non-4K read/write operations where perhaps the SanDisk SSDs perform better ? And would it be possible to have some results for the Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb in AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 please if the SSD is still available for testing ? :) Thanks :)
Highlanderix - Thursday, June 26, 2014 - link
And finally, I hesitate between the SanDisk Extreme Pro 256Gb (150€ here in France) and the Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb (165€). 10 year warranty sound really good but which one is better in terms of pure performance ? Which one should I take ?Phreedom1 - Sunday, June 29, 2014 - link
I don't understand. In this review it says that the Sandisk Extreme Pro is the fastest SSD available yet when you go to the "Bench" area of this website, pick the Extreme Pro and put it up against something like the Samsung 840 Pro, the Samsung wins in many of the benchmarks. Even when put up against the Sandisk Extreme II the newer Extremem Pro loses out in many of the marks. I'm just looking for the all around fastest 240/256GB SSD but it seems every site I go to has a different opinion.himem.sys - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
Some people complain about real-world difference between ssd drives (because drives are fast enough). Nah, thay arent :). I can tell that my 240GB hyperx is better than most 7k rpm drives, but its a turtle wgen compared to ramdrive. I cutted off 25GB partition from 32Gb of total memory to do some special things and i see huge difference. Installation a windows 2012 r2 with sql 2012 on hyper-v? Its a matter of minutes (i7 3770 @ 4.1). Benchmarks? Who needs them when you have powershell [get-counter -Counter '\process(_total)\io data operations/sec']. I used ramdrives on dell r820 filled with ram and can tell this: the slowest part of pc/server is and will be cpu :).Tornadotuan - Friday, July 8, 2016 - link
Hi Hardware Community,I know this article is quite outdated right now, nevertheless the actual topic of the authors "Final Words" bug me right now. Especially now that enough time for longtime-endurance tests has passed.
Anyway, I can´t choose between the Samsung EVO 850 1TB v2 (289€) and die SanDisk Extreme 960GB (281€).
So pricewise the "Pro" is even cheaper right now compared to the Samsung. But there are some obvious differences:
- TLC 3D V-NAND vs. MLC Planar
- 5 years vs. 10 years warranty
- 150 TBW vs. 80 TBW
- higher Peak vs. consistency
- Samsung Bugging vs. sudden death drives
My usage:
- Client for everything: gaming, programming, office, multimedia - averything
- gonna split it in system and data-partition
- gonne be in laptop that´s used as desktop
- battery is wasted, so no concern about power consumption
So, usually I use hardware until it´s broken so meaning about 8-10 years.
Still I want steady performance without sudden decline in speed like with the EVO 840 :C
I´d be really glad, if you could tell me your opinion on this :)