
Taking the Extreme II apart is easy. Four screws hide behind the label, and the plastic top half falls away from the metal chassis down below. A series of thermal pads mate PCB components to the metal housing for improved heat transfer. These pads cover the DRAM cache, Marvell's controller, and the eight NAND packages. It's like silly putty in a way; it tends to pull the screen printing off of component ICs, making them harder to decipher in photographs.

The 240 GB PCB you see here may not completely reflect the final product. What shouldn't change, however, are the eight quad-die packages of 19 nm ABL eX2 Toggle-mode NAND, adding up to 256 GB of capacity. The Toggle-mode interface eliminates the clock signal needed by synchronous flash, theoretically lowering power consumption. We've seen similar power characteristics from the 19 nm flash manufactured by Toshiba and SanDisk, though older Toggle-mode-based SSDs tended to use more power than competing drives with ONFi-compliant memory.
Marvell's '9187 controller is flanked by 256 MB of Hynix DDR3 DRAM. We like to see a ratio of DRAM to NAND running 1 MB for every gigabyte of flash on-board, so it makes sense that this 240 GB Extreme II has 256 GB riding shotgun. The 120 GB hosts 128 MB of cache, while the 480 GB model sports 512 MB.
The PCB's back side is bare, aside from some solder points.

- Extreme II, The Sequel From SanDisk
- A Guided Tour Of SanDisk's Extreme II
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Results: Sequential Performance
- Results: Random Performance
- Results: Tom's Storage Bench
- Results: PCMark Vantage And PCMark 7
- Results: Power Consumption
- Not Extreme To The Second Power, But Close Enough
Also, you appear to have put one of the labels back on the wrong way round.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vertex-450-256gb-review,3517.html
See here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7006/sandisk-extreme-ii-review-480gb
It's Anand's new favorite SSD, and based on the results, I'm inclined to agree.
It's peak performance is right up there with the 840 Pro, but what's really extreme is the drive's consistency. It's performance when the drive is close to full is unmatched.
There are no high peaks accompanied by low valleys in performance when it comes to the Extreme II. It's pretty much smooth and fast sailing all the time, which in my book, places the Extreme II a step above the 840 Pro. The 840 Pro would have to be at least $30 cheaper than the Extreme II for me to even consider it over the Extreme II.
The "Heavy hitters" for modern SSDs include the fastest SSDs on the market right now, which are The Plextor M5 pro Xtreme, the OCZ Vector and Samsung 840 pro. Of these, you have only included the OCZ, and the slower version of the Plextor. Also, you have also included the old Crucial m4, which is a good drive, but old, and not one of the heavyweights now. At least include the improved "M500" version. I also find it confusing why you include the older Samsung 830.
These are minor points though. Thank you for the great comparison. I look forward to more storage comparisons
that single omission itself made this review critically flawed.
Thanks,
Chris
What we are seeing is stagnation. We have a great Marvell controller, Indilinx Barefoot 2 controllwer and a solide Sandforce 2000 series controllered SSDs.
I'm waiting for the next generation, maybe for the Sandforce/LSI 3000 series controllers that can do 200,000 IOPS! Google it. Though that drive was using a PCIe 4x interface rather than SATA but it was in the 2.5" drive form factor.
Maybe increase queue depth of 1 4KB random reads and write speeds too. So far I've only seen as high as about 30MB/s 4K random read with a queue depth of 1 on Crystaldisk Mark.