Model: SanDisk Extreme II 240GB Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: SanDisk
Provided By: SanDisk
SanDisk has been a leader in the storage industry for more than 20 years. Founded in 1988 by Dr. Eli Harari, the company has grown from a three-person Silicon Valley startup to the world's largest provider of flash memory storage solutions. The company offers a wide range of products including memory cards, USB flash drives, SSDs and its popular line of Sansa music and video players.
With the launch of the Extreme last spring, SanDisk made its long awaited entrance into the high-performance SSD market. Designed with enthusiasts and gamers in mind, the Extreme was powered by LSI's SandForce SF-2281 processor and featured a SATA 6GB/s interface, native TRIM support and DuraClass technology. The drive also used a custom firmware and SanDisk's own 24nm MLC Toggle Mode NAND flash to deliver speeds up to 10x faster than a 7,200 RPM hard disk drive.
At this year's Computex show, SanDisk unveiled the successor to the Extreme. Aptly named the Extreme II, this ultra-slim SSD is powered by Marvell's 88SS9187 "Monet" controller and is equipped with SanDisk's new 19nm eX2 ABL MLC Toggle NAND flash to deliver up to 550 MB/s sequential read and 510 MB/s sequential write speeds. The Extreme II also features a tiered caching system which includes a sizeable DRAM cache as well as support for SanDisk's nCache technology. Designed to improve random write performance, nCache uses a large non-volatile SLC cache to accumulate small writes at high speed and then flushes them to the larger MLC sections of the NAND flash memory array.
The Extreme II is available in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities. For this review, SanDisk sent us the 240GB version of the drive which comes equipped with 256MB of on-board cache and is capable of delivering up to 550 MB/s sequential read and 510 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 95,000 random read and 78,000 random write IOPS.
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General Specifications
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Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the Extreme II has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at SanDisk's new SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the Extreme II have what it takes? Can it deliver the value and performance we've come to expect from SanDisk? Keep reading as we find out.
