SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD Reviewed At 64, 128, And 256 GB

Features
By Christopher Ryan
published

SanDisk's Ultra Plus replaces the company's older SATA 3Gb/s SandForce-based Ultra with something a bit more modern, and with a budget-oriented price tag. We test all three capacities to see if the entry-level pricing belies a pocket rocket in disguise.

Test Setup And Benchmarks

Our consumer storage test bench is based on Intel's Z77 Platform Controller Hub paired with an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU. Intel's 6- and 7-series chipsets are virtually identical from a storage perspective. We're standardizing on older RST 10.6.1002 drivers for the foreseeable future.

Changes in RST's driver packages occasionally result in subtle performance changes. They can also lead to some truly profound variance in scores and results as well, depending on the driver revision. Some versions flush writes more or less frequently. Others work better in RAID situations. In fact, builds 11.2 and newer support TRIM in RAID as well. Regardless, results obtained with one revision may or may not be comparable to results obtained with another, so sticking with one version across all testing is mandatory.

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Test Hardware
ProcessorIntel Core i5-2400 (Sandy Bridge), 32 nm, 3.1 GHz, LGA 1155, 6 MB Shared L3, Turbo Boost Enabled
MotherboardGigabyte G1.Sniper M3
MemoryG.Skill Ripjaws 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3-1866 @ DDR3-1333, 1.5 V
System DriveKingston HyperX 3K 240 GB, Firmware 5.02
Tested DrivesSanDisk Ultra Plus 64 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: X211200
Row 5 - Cell 0 SanDisk Ultra Plus 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware X211200
Row 6 - Cell 0 SanDisk Ultra Plus 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware X211200
Row 7 - Cell 0 Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware DXM04B0Q
Row 8 - Cell 0 Samsung 840 Pro 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware DXM04B0Q
Row 9 - Cell 0 SanDisk Extreme II 120 GB, Firmware: R1311
Row 10 - Cell 0 SanDisk Extreme II 240 GB, Firmware: R1311
Row 11 - Cell 0 SanDisk Extreme II 480 GB, Firmware: R1311
Row 12 - Cell 0 Seagate 600 SSD 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: B660
Row 13 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 525 30 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi
Row 14 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 525 60 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi
Row 15 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 525 120 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi
Row 16 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 525 180 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi
Row 17 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 525 240 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi
Row 18 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 335 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 335s
Row 19 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 510 250 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: PWG2
Row 20 - Cell 0 OCZ Vertex 3.20 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.25
Row 21 - Cell 0 OCZ Vector 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.0
Row 22 - Cell 0 Samsung 830 512 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: CXMO3B1Q
Row 23 - Cell 0 Crucial m4 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 000F
Row 24 - Cell 0 Plextor M5 Pro 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 1.02
Row 25 - Cell 0 Corsair Neutron GTX 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: M206
GraphicsMSI Cyclone GTX 460 1 GB
Power SupplySeasonic X-650, 650 W 80 PLUS Gold
ChassisLian Li Pitstop
RAIDLSI 9266-8i PCIe x8, FastPath and CacheCade AFK
System Software and Drivers
OperatingSystemWindows 7 x64 Ultimate
DirectXDirectX 11
DriversGraphics: Nvidia 314.07RST: 10.6.1002IMEI: 7.1.21.1124
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Benchmarks
Tom's Hardware StorageBench v1.0Trace-Based
IOmeter 1.1.0# Workers = 1, 4 KB Random: LBA=16 GB, varying QDs, 128 KB Sequential, 8 GB LBA Precondition, Exponential QD Scaling
PCMark 7Secondary Storage Suite
PCM VantageStorage Suit
FIO2.0.14
Christopher Ryan
12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Madn3ss795
    Samsung 840's biggest competitor!
    Reply
  • kevith
    I have had the former SanDisk Extreme 128 GB for a year now, and it´s definitely fast enough. But what´s more impressive is, that after a year, the write amplification still hovers between 0,800 and 0,805. I´m using it in my laptop for quite "normal" use, FB, YouTube, mail, wordprocessing etc.on Windows 8 64-bit. So far it has served me very well, my next SSD is going to be another SanDisk
    Reply
  • Soda-88
    I recommended this SSD (256GB) to my friend just a week ago since it was nearly as cheap as top of the line 128GB SSDs, glad to read positive review.
    Reply
  • alidan
    im honestly looking into ssd drives for games and mass small file storage.
    these are cheap, and they are large, would definitely help with load times/game performance, and browsing images stored enmass.
    Reply
  • Brian Fulmer
    I ordered 5 Extreme 128GB drives in March (model SDSSDHP-128G). I've been using OCZ, Kingston, Samsung and Crucial drives in every desktop and notebook I've deployed since August 2013. Out of ~75 drives, I've had 1 bad Vertex 4 and 6 defective by design Crucial V4's. Of the 5 SanDisks, 2 failed before deployment. Support was laughably incompetent in demanding the drives be updated with the latest firmware. Their character mode updater couldn't see the drives, because they DIED. SanDisk is no longer on my buy list.

    Incidentally, of the 8 SSD model SSD P5 128GB, I've had one die. The context should be of 35 Vertex 4's, I've had one die. I've had zero failures with 15 840's despite their supposedly fragile design.
    Reply
  • ssdpro
    Brian Fulmer's comments are very reasonable (except the "deployed since Aug 2013" part lol). Way too many people experience a failure then scream all drives from that mfg are junk. I have owned 2 840 Pro drives and had one fault out. Does that mean Samsung drives have a 50 percent failure rate? For me, yes, but overall no and I am definitely not that naive. The 840 Pro can and do fail like anything electrical can. I have owned probably a dozen OCZ drives and had one Vertex 2 failure - does that mean OCZ/SandForce firmware stinks and they aren't reliable? No, it just means a drive died and who knows why. I have owned a couple SanDisk products and none failed. Does that mean SanDisk is the best? No... it just means I didn't have one die but I also only sampled 2.
    Reply
  • Combat Wombat
    These and the OCZ drives from newegg are looking mighty close in price!
    BF4 Rebuild is about to take place :D
    Reply
  • @ssdpro: spot on. sure, if i buy from vendor a and his product fails, i will probably not buy from him again. if it fails more than once, there is no chance i'll buy his stuff again and i also will warn others about it. but understandable as this is, in the end even that doesn't mean much about the reliability of the manufacturer.

    that's also why i'm a bit sceptical about product ratings on amazon and the likes, since people are more inclined to complain about a bad experience, than share their view on a product that simply does what it should do: work.

    what we would need more often are statistics from bigger companies, or even repair services, so we don't have to base our purchases on samples of a few dozen to a few hundreds, but on thousands upon thousands of cases.
    Reply
  • flong777
    The 840 Pro still appears to be the fastest overall SSD on the planet - but the difference between the top 5 is pretty much negligible. Among the top five, reliability and cost become the determining factors.
    Reply
  • anything4this
    I don't understand the ~500MBs read limit on the drives. Is it an interface bottleneck?
    Reply