SSD, SanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB

--Rezkymedia.Blogspot.com-- Keep it simple, stupid. Even if that means making everything, well, stupid. That’s pretty much how the mass marketing of most consumer goods works. It explains why the processor industry disappeared down the rabbit hole chasing megahertz in the late 1990s. More megahertz must be better. It’s a simple and effective sales pitch. Likewise, the burgeoning CPU core counts in smartphones. Never mind that most software and apps on mobile devices aren’t multi-threaded, that phone has eight cores. It must be totally awesome.

Apply that same logic to everything from megapixels in cameras to milliseconds in LCD panels and you’ve got the sales pitch all sown up. In that context, we fear for SanDisk’s Extreme Pro. It may not be cynical enough. SanDisk seems to have concentrated on producing a drive that gives a great experience, rather than merely ticking boxes and chasing specs.

For starters, this is a SATA 6Gbps drive, not a fancy new M.2 model with NVMe and PCI Express-powered bandwidth. It’s won’t turn any heads with claimed read and write performance of 550MB/s and 515MB/s respectively. Okay, the 4K IOPS numbers don’t look half bad at around 100,000 each. Until you remember drives with NVMe support are due to hit the million mark.

On paper, then, the Extreme Pro looks routine. Until you clock the 10-year warranty. Then there’s the nuanced metric of drive performance that is consistency. Pretty much all SSDs fly out of the box. The rate at which performance falls off with use, however, is much more variable and has a big impact on how good an experience you actually get. But again, it’s also an extremely unsexy measure of performance.

Anyway, SanDisk claims the Extreme Pro is more consistent than the usual suspects including Samsung’s 850 Pro and the Crucial M550. How so? The basic specs don’t give much away. There’s SanDisk’s 19nm MLC NAND memory and a slightlycrusty Marvell 88SS9187 controller. Okay, SanDisk has provided a large 32GB slab of spare NAND memory to step in as cells die off and enable that 10-year warranty, albeit at the cost of overall usable capacity. And its nCache tech does some clever things courtesy of using a small section of usable memory in high-performance SLC mode.

But in the end, it’s stuff you can’t easily point to that makes the difference, namely SanDisk’s firmware. A quick glance at our benchmarks wouldn’t have you sprinting out to pick up an Extreme Pro. Sure, it puts out very competitive numbers for a 6Gbps SATA drive, but it’s also one hell of a lot more expensive. With one critical exception. The Extreme Pro returned the best performance consistency numbers we’ve ever seen.

This drive just keeps on trucking, no matter how much you throw at it. In the real world, then, the Extreme Pro will be tangibly faster than just about any other SATA 6Gbps SSD you can currently buy. Because it will still be performing near its peak while other drives have lost their edge. Whether that’s worth the price is another question, especially in the context of the slightly stingy 480GB usable capacity, not to mention the imminent influx of M.2 NVMe drives. If it weren’t for the latter, we’d heartily recommend the Extreme Pro. But they are coming and that makes spending this much on a SATA drive a bit of a stretch.

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