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Model: SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB 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.

Over the last year or so, SanDisk has introduced a number of new solid state drives for the consumer market. The latest addition to their product lineup is the Ultra Plus. This new consumer-oriented SSD is powered by Marvell's 88SS9175 controller chip and is equipped with SanDisk's own 19nm eX2 ABL MLC NAND to deliver up to 530MB/s read and 450MB/s write speeds. The Ultra Plus also packs 128MB of DRAM cache and offers features like TRIM support, dynamic wear-leveling, background garbage collection and SanDisk's nCache technology which uses a large non-volatile SLC cache to improve random write performance. The nCache accumulates small writes at high speed and then flushes them to the larger MLC section of the NAND flash memory array.

The Ultra Plus is available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities. For this review, SanDisk sent us the 256GB version of the drive which is capable of delivering up to 530 MB/s sequential read and 445 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 82,000 random read and 39,000 random write IOPS.

 SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB Solid State Drive
General Specifications
Part Number SDSSDHP-256G
Capacity 256GB
Flash Type 19nm eX2 ABL MLC NAND
Controller Marvell 88SS9175
Cache 128MB DDR2 DRAM
Form Factor 2.5-inch
Interface SATA III 6Gb/s

Performance
Sequential Read 530 MB/s Max
Sequential Write 445 MB/s Max
Random Read 82,000 IOPS Max
Random Write 39,000 IOPS Max

Reliability
MTBF 2 million hours

Power Consumption
Active 0.12 W
Max Read Operating 2.9 W
Max Write Operating 4.8 W
Slumber 0.08 W

Environmental
Temperature (Operating) 0 ºC to 70 ºC
Temperature (Non-Operating) -55 ºC to 95 ºC
Vibration (Operating) 5g RMS, 10- 2000Hz
Vibration (Non-Operating) 4.9g RMS, 7- 800Hz
Shock 1500G @ 0.5 msec

Dimensions and Weight
Dimensions 7 mm x 69.85 mm x 100.5 mm
Weight 40g

Other Features
nCache technology
Dynamic and Static Wear-Leveling
Bad Block Management
Background Garbage Collection
Supports TRIM, SMART and NCQ
Three year warranty

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the Ultra Plus 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 Ultra Plus have what it takes? Can it deliver the value and performance we've come to expect from SanDisk? Keep reading as we find out.


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