Model | SanDisk Extreme SSD 120 GByte |
Capacity | 120 GByte |
Memory | synchronous NAND Flash |
Technology | SandForce SF-2281 |
Throughput | up to 550 MB/s reading, up to 510 MB/s writing |
Accesstime (read) | < 0.1 ms |
Life expectance | 2'500'000 hours (MTBF) |
Acoustics | no noise |
Warranty | 3 Years |
Models tested | ||
Testenvironment |
||
Motherboard | ASUS P8P67 Deluxe B3 | |
Chipset | Intel P67 | 1'333 MHz |
CPU | Intel Core i7 2600k | 3.4 GHz |
Memory | Kingston HyperX 2133 | 4 GByte |
Graphics card | Gigabyte GeForce GTX 285 | |
Storage (system) | Seagate Barracuda | 640 GByte |
Operating systems | Ubuntu - most recent Kernel version Windows 7 64 Bit with caching drives |
|
Filesystem | XFS |
We think everybody reading this article can imagine the following scenario: You just bought a hard drive which according the specs sheet should transfer 120 MByte/s reading and writing. In the reviews you read about astonishing 110 MByte/s but after you put the drive into you system it feels much slower. The whole story gets even worse when you start a benchmark which does randomread/write of 4 KByte blocks. There you only get two to three MBytes/s.
Because of this we don't want to publish screenshots of standard programs like HD-Tach, HD-Tune, ... we want our tests to be
... sind.
We test with activated caches and NCQ (Native Command Queueing) because they're also activated under daily use. But the data size tested is always at least twice the amount of the memory. In this there will be no intereference.
We noticed that the measuring error is constantly within ±2%. Therefore we mention it only here.
Additionally we evaluate the S.M.A.R.T. data to assess if there are already errors.
The following table give you a brief overview to which points we turn our centre of attention.
Test | Observations |
Sequential Read/Write Tests |
|
Random Read/Write Tests |
|
iozone3 is a benchmark suit for storage solutions which natively runs under Linux.
Therefore we are testing the throughput with different block sizes using the following commands:
It is important to reproduce scenarios of daily usage. Certain parameters need to be variable during the test to make a statement about the product. In our test the parameters are the different block sizes. It defines the size in KBytes which is written/read on the drive during a transaction.
With this method one can test the reading and writing of either small and big files. In a normal personal computer environment you usually don't find many files smaller than 16 KByte. The relative amount of small files is much bigger on a mail or database server. Therefore tests with small block sizes are of interest for database-based applications.
In bigger RAID arrays the hard disk cache is usually disabled and the RAID-Controller takes over the job of caching. Exactly in such setups hard drives need to be very fast when reading or writing small amounts of data. Sequential throughput isn't interesting in this case.
With its SandForce SF-2281 based Extreme SSD 120 GB, SanDisk doesn't reach the performance values they advertise in the specifications by a small margin. We measured the following peaks: 507 MByte were possible when writing and 523 MByte/s were reached reading sequentially. Still, on average the 120 GByte Extreme SSD is a quick drive, especially compared to the other 120 Gigabyte drives available on the market. At this point we have to mention that 240 GByte drives in general are faster than smaller 120 GByte or even 60 GByte drives which is because of the wear levelling algorithm that works more efficient the bigger the drive is.
If we take a closer look at IOPS
performance SanDisk promises sustained values of 83'000 IOPS for 4k writes and
23'000 IOPS for 4k reads. During our tests we measured about 53'000 IOPS
regarding random writes. Concerning random reads you get a solid 22'000 IOPS. These values are significantly
lower then the numbers advertised by the manufacturer.
The delivery of this drive is quite poor. We would really like to see a 2.5 inch
to 3.5 inch adaptor to install the drive properly also in cases that do not have
2.5 drive bays. Furthermore many manufacturers put a key or a CD regarding a
disk cloning software in the box. With the Extreme SSD from SanDisk there is
nothing like this.
If you should be looking for a well performing 120 GByte SSD which comes with a
Toggle NAND flash then the SanDisk Extreme SSD120 GByte will be the right
choice for you.
The SanDisk Extreme SSD 120 GB gets four out of five stars.