SanDisk Ultra II 240GB SSD Review – SanDisk’s First TLC NAND SSD

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 Z97 Platform

Benchmark Results: The Ultra II actually did better on this benchmark than the AS-SSD which is unusual as they generally output similar scores. Overall, the numbers look better than what we saw on the OCZ ARC drive – especially in reads.

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.

Benchmark Results: IOPS performance is very solid as well, outpacing the OCZ ARC drive with reads and writes being relatively equal which isn’t always the case, especially in budget drives.