11-Drive DRAMless SSD Round Up

By Chris Ramseyer
published

SanDisk Z410

The SanDisk Z Series is a channel product. What does that really mean? Not too much for shoppers, despite what some companies claim. The fact is this; channel products are business-focused but still appear on the same Newegg and Amazon sales pages. You can buy these products just like any other. They usually have a fixed bill of materials and undergo lengthy validation. Often they are slightly slower than normal retail SSDs, but that is only to ensure additional interoperability or to make the product more reliable.

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SanDisk lists full product details on the Z410 DRAMless SSD. This series ships in 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities. We have all three in the lab for testing. Users don't receive a fancy box or any accessories. Amazon even states the Z410 480GB now ships in a cost-reducing brown box. I'm excited already.

Our three Z410 SSDs shipped with an SMI SM2256S controller. SMI tells us that is the label for the SM2256XT controller. The controller features Low-Density Parity Code (LDPC) error correction, but we could say the same about every product in this roundup. WD paired the SM2256XT with SanDisk's 15nm TLC flash, which is the third-generation 10nm-class NAND from its joint venture with Toshiba.

SanDisk no longer lists the Z410 on its website. We scoured the site looking for more details and came up empty. The drives are on Amazon and Newegg, as well as other popular online shopping locations. Prices start out at just $42.99 for the 120GB model and move to $63.99 for the 240GB and finally $114.99 for the 480GB. The SSDs are covered by a 3-year warranty.

The Z410 works with SanDisk's Dashboard software, but you will need to download it from SanDisk's website.

SanDisk Z410 (120GB)

Reasons to buy

+
SanDisk Dashboard software support
+
Low cost

Reasons to avoid

-
Inconsistent / Poor performance

SanDisk Z410 (120GB)

SanDisk Z410 (240GB)

Reasons to buy

+
SanDisk Dashboard software support
+
Low cost

Reasons to avoid

-
Inconsistent / Poor performance

SanDisk Z410 (240GB)

SanDisk Z410 (480GB)

Reasons to buy

+
SanDisk Dashboard software support
+
Low cost

Reasons to avoid

-
Inconsistent / Poor performance

SanDisk Z410 (480GB)


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Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews consumer storage.
Topics
SSD
Storage
31 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ponchato
    Look you guys need to get rid of this autoplaying, auto-resizing video or I'm done here. A tech website should not be this unusable. Skipping half a page down when I scroll slightly too far is incredibly annoying and you KNOW it irritates people and kills site usability. If it's not fixed or removed by this time next week (that's February 18th, 2017) I'm never coming to Tom's again.
    Reply
  • MCMunroe
    I agree with ponchato. Every page has this big video that plays the same damn thing that is usually the biggest image on the screen. For months it was a smaller video of Doom that played over and over, and now is a big video of cherry keys. WTF.
    Can't you just tuck in normal ads?
    Reply
  • hixbot
    Agreed. And these click bait "from the web" ads are fake news scams at best and misogynistic and offensive at worst.
    Reply
  • JimmiG
    I have a WD Green 240 GB SSD (DRAM less Marvell 88SS1074 and TLC) as a Steam games drive. It works fine for that purpose, since it's mostly sequential/random reads and very few writes (only when a game updates). No reason to not get one for that purpose, even as an "enthusiast". However, I wouldn't use them as system drives. I'm using a Samsung 850 Evo for that.
    Reply
  • Mindrax
    Use uBlock or Adblock to prevent that.
    :)
    I can't believe you don't already.
    Internet is a horrible place without blockers.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Gosh, I'm getting so paranoid about these ads that I wasn't even sure if the

    Was this helpful?
    Tom's needs your feedbackbanner was legit. Seems to be.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Thanks for the tests, Chris (and the correction, Jon).

    Some of these SSD definitely need to come with a warning label!
    Reply
  • jakjawagon
    You guys need to fix your UK website. Half the graphs are missing. Posting this here as well because it's more likely to be seen.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    19284248 said:
    You guys need to fix your UK website. Half the graphs are missing. Posting this here as well because it's more likely to be seen.
    On some articles, with pages that have lots of graphs, occasionally not all of them load for me. I'd say try restarting your web browser or use a different one & see if that makes a difference.
    Reply
  • derekullo
    Firefox + Noscript + Adblock + Hosts file from www.winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

    Stop complaining and just block them.

    I literally see 0 ads on Toms when I use the above with Firefox.

    The host file i would say is the most important.

    Even when I open Chrome 90% of the ads are gone, including the super annoying Doom video some guy was posting about yesterday. I literally had to go to another computer that didn't have the custom host file to see it. lol

    I don't have adblock nor noscript with chrome so the hosts file alone is blocking those ads.
    Reply