SanDisk Extreme Pro 240GB SSD Review

Solid State drives is a boon for every PC users. I have been reviewing SSDs for a very long time and the progress it has made is very encouraging since the SandForce based Kingston Hyper X days. As time passes by, solid state drives have become more reliable and cheaper. Many SSD based controller makers have stepped up, and even adopted as a default option in some OEM based PC systems and notebooks. Along with the fabrication development of processors and chipsets, SSDs in SATA, mSATA and m.2 resulted in smaller and thinner PCs.

The SanDisk Extreme Pro is isn’t something new, it’s a year-old drive. But due to a gradual decrease in cost, higher capacity SSDs of such kind become a good value for many types of users. SanDisk Ultra II and SanDisk Extreme Pro are two of such SSDs along with many other SSDs made by Samsung, Intel, Micron and other brands. The Extreme Pro is based on 64Gbit 19nm MLC and uses a Marvel controller, a bit of an upgrade compared to Extreme II that I’ve reviewed earlier. The best part is that this is the first consumer-grade drive I’ve seen with a ten-year warranty support. Up until now, the norm has been three and Five years, both of which is very reasonable.

Note that this doesn’t mean the endurance of Extreme Pro is more than drives with three or 5 years of warranty period. But it does help in trying to convince a large number of consumers to switch from mechanical to SSDs.

The packaging is a standalone packing, with a 7mm z-axis thick drive and a spacer for certain notebooks with thicker HDD cradle.

Unlike the Ultra II, Extreme Pro starts with a minimum storage capacity of 240GB and stays up to 960GB. Each NAND contains 32GB and the 240GB variant has a total of eight chips. 16GB is used for overprovisioning.

It uses a Marvel 88SS9187-BLD2 eight-channel dual core based controller. There’s also a Micron DDR3 RAM for caching. This should help in better write functions.

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