SanDisk Extreme PRO Series SSD Review

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CrystalDiskMark & Anvil IOPS

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 – Intel Z77 Platform

SanDisk Extreme PRO 240GB CrystalDiskMark SanDisk Extreme PRO 480GB CrystalDiskMark SanDisk Extreme PRO 960GB CrystalDiskMark

Benchmark Results: As with the AS-SSD benchmark, read scores are strong, writes fall off a little and the 4K writes are about half of what we see from a number of drives with different controllers as well as the Extreme II.

CrystalDiskMark Grid

There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 32. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.

240GB:

SanDisk Extreme PRO 240GB IOPS Reads SanDisk Extreme PRO 240GB IOPS Writes

480GB:

SanDisk Extreme PRO 480GB IOPS Reads SanDisk Extreme PRO 480GB IOPS Writes

960GB:

SanDisk Extreme PRO 960GB IOPS Writes SanDisk Extreme PRO 960GB IOPS Reads

Benchmark Results: IOPS performance was pretty even across all three drives with strong read performance and write performance that wasn’t far behind. This is one test where the Extreme PRO drives bested the Extreme II drives by a significant margin.

IOPS Chart