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The Extreme comes in a small, black box. While there aren't a lot of details on the back, the front advertises key features like the drive's 240GB capacity and SATA 6Gbps interface as well as some of the advantages of a solid state drive.
SanDisk doesn't include a lot of extras with the Extreme. Aside from the SSD, the only other thing in the box is a small, fold out guide that contains warranty information as well as installation instructions for both desktop and notebook computers.
Physical Features:
The Extreme looks very similar to SanDisk's Ultra series SSDs. The drive's outer casing is made entirely out of metal and is covered by a durable, matte black finish. There is also a large, black and red sticker showing that the SSD is part of SanDisk's Extreme series.
As I mentioned earlier, the Extreme uses LSI's SandForce SF-2281 controller chip. The SF-2281 can be found in a number of other SSD's including the ADATA S511, Corsair Force Series 3, OWC Mercury 6G, Kingston HyperX, OCZ Vertex 3 and Patriot Pyro SE.
For the Extreme, SanDisk opted to use their own 32GB 24nm (05091 032G) MLC Toggle Mode NAND flash chips. Looking at the pictures above, you can see that the 240GB version of the drive has four of these chips on either side of the PCB. If you do the math, you'll see that this equals 256GB and not the 240GB of storage the drive advertises. The SandForce controller uses this extra 7% (16GB) to maximize read and write performance and extend the endurance and overall reliability of the drive.
