SanDisk X210 256 And 512 GB: Enthusiast Speed; OEM Reliability

Results: Tom's Hardware Storage Bench, Continued

Service Times

Beyond the average data rate reported on the previous page, there's even more information we can collect from Tom's Hardware's Storage Bench. For instance, mean (average) service times show what responsiveness is like on an average I/O during the trace.

It would be difficult to graph the 10+ million I/Os that make up our test, so looking at the average time to service an I/O makes more sense. For a more nuanced idea of what's transpiring during the trace, we plot mean service times for reads against writes. That way, drives with better latency show up closer to the origin; lower numbers are better.

Write latency is simply the total time it takes an input or output operation to be issued by the host operating system, travel to the storage subsystem, commit to the storage device, and have the drive acknowledge the operation. Read latency is similar. The operating system asks the storage device for data stored in a certain location, the SSD reads that information, and then it's sent to the host. Modern computers are fast and SSDs are zippy, but there's still a significant amount of latency involved in a storage transaction.

SanDisk's new offerings fall just behind their Extreme II counterparts, albeit by just a few percent.

The 19 nm Toggle-mode flash attached to Marvell's processor is potent, though not enough so to push above the Samsung and clever OCZ drives. Read latency is approximately 10% behind the leaders.

The newest enthusiast-grade SSDs from Samsung and OCZ posses amazing write properties. Compared to drives from a few years ago, the very latest are stupid-quick. And that doesn't just apply to sequential writes, although they're very fast. Rather, we're most impressed by the ability of an SSD to service write I/O with minimal delay. SanDisk's drives are no exception, and the Extreme IIs and X210 handle our trace effortlessly. The X210s are only marginally slower than their client-oriented counterparts.

  • vertexx
    I logged onto Tom's this morning totally expecting a Kaveri review. What's up?
    Reply
  • TeraMedia
    Is the warranty 5 years or 3? Last page says one thing, an early page says another.Decent review, decent drives. Has THG considered doing something similar to what the car mags do, where they take certain products and use them for a year? It would be great to capture that kind of longer-term info on certain types of products, especially the kind that wear out (ODDs, fans, cases, HDDs, SSDs, etc.).
    Reply
  • Quarkzquarkz
    What about Samsung SSD pro 512GB? I bought 2 of these and on that chart is only 128 and 256GB
    Reply
  • vmem
    @vertexxthere isn't anything particularly exciting about Kaveri going by Anand's review. I shall want for the A10 version with higher clocks
    Reply
  • smeezekitty
    MLC with 5k write endurance!And affordable and fast?We may very well have a new solid contender in the SSD world
    Reply
  • eklipz330
    anandtech has one? sweeeet, later tom's!
    Reply
  • RedJaron
    I agree with Chris. I don't need the fastest bench speeds in a SSD. Most models now are very fast and the user won't see the performance difference. I want reliability and longevity. Looks like this is a smart choice for any new builder.
    Reply
  • Phillip Wager
    sweet finally another company that can compete with intel's 5 year warrenty!
    Reply
  • jake_westmorley
    Can we PLEASE have some normal graphs for once? The graph on page 5 in stupid 3D is so bad it's comical. The "perspective" effect completely screws with the data. This has zero added value and is almost as bad as still using clipart.
    Reply
  • Duff165
    I find it hard to believe that the author has had "literally dozens of SSd's die" on him over the years. This would suggest that many systems have contributed to the demise of many of the SSD's being used, which seems somewhat outlandish. Just the cost factor involved in the purchase of so many SSD's and then having over a dozen of them fail, supposedly also from various companies, since if they were all from the same company it would not really be conducive to good sales. One, or maybe two I could live with, but dozens? No.
    Reply