There's a lot to like about the Extreme II, and it's good to see SanDisk leveraging its unique strengths to create an enthusiast-oriented offering. Moving units in the retail space isn't just about selling more drives; getting the message out to raise SanDisk's profile is probably even more important to the company. If the Extreme II is a success, the benefits will no doubt go beyond selling a few more boxed SSDs.

With that in mind, it's helpful that the Extreme II represents itself assertively in the hand-to-hand knife fight that is high-performance storage. Is it the fastest of the fast? Probably not. It is fast enough to do battle amongst that esteemed company? We sure think so. And it's hard not to like the idea of Marvell's '9187 controller with Toggle-mode NAND and an emulated-SLC twist. nCache seems a lot like what OCZ has been doing with its Vertex 4/450 and Vector drives, at least on a spiritual level, if not on a technical one. SanDisk and OCZ are both looking for advantages anywhere they can find them, and their respective solutions add value in a segment where innovation is increasingly hard to come by.
The Extreme II isn't very fancy-looking. But it's fast and has the cachet that comes from a NAND fabricator's SSD. Samsung, Intel, and Micron/Crucial have reputations based in large part on their engineering and validation, but also from the fact that they're responsible for what is arguably the most important ingredient in an SSD: the flash itself.
More competition from SanDisk is going to put more pressure on the vendors already left in the lurch by higher material costs. The Extreme II is just another evidentiary exhibit that the SSD producers at the bottom of the food chain are on borrowed time. Even as solid-state drive shipments increase year-over-year, the harsh reality is that companies like SanDisk are already in the driver's seat. The more precariously-positioned firms are going to be along for the ride. When push comes to shove, who can undercut a NAND manufacturer that builds its own SSDs?
We'd have a hard time naming every SSD manufacturer, and the average enthusiast familiar with storage probably couldn't name more than a few. But there's a good chance that Intel, Crucial, and Samsung are on that list. At the end of the day, maybe what SanDisk wants most is to be included in the conversation.

- 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.