SanDisk Extreme 240GB Review
In terms of Storage, SanDisk branding is one of the most popular and reliable product in the market right now from Micro SD, SD Card and even SSD. But since SanDisk has a very prominent name pricing of its products are doubled comparing to its competitors. But base on experience performance is totally top-notch.
Today we’re taking a look at the SanDisk Extreme 240GB 2.5-inch Solid State Drive. This SSD is a bit old it was released early 2012 still available in some online and local stores but unfortunately you won’t see it anymore on the official SanDisk Website. It’s been upgraded to Extreme II and Extreme Pro which are both totally expensive but what you pay is totally worth it.
So is it the same with the SanDisk Extreme a 2-year-old SSD with a pricing roughly still round Php10,000 — Php14,000 but you’ll be lucky if you find lower than that like mine 😉
[section label=”Packaging, Build and Design” anchor=”design”]
Packaging, Build and Design
SanDisk has a consistent design packaging and accent for all of its product. A combination of Red, Black and white color is dominant with the SanDisk Extreme. In the box itself there’s really no other details but just the features, certification and multilingual on whats inside the box.
Inside includes a 3.5″ mounting bracket, screws and a SATA 6 Gb/s cable and the user manual.
There’s really nothing to much to expect in terms of bundle with the SanDisk Extreme and sadly no Software included for backup :(. but for the packaging it’s still once of the minimalist yet elegant designed package for hard drives.
The SSD itself is a pure black plastic coated material with a large Sticker branding of SanDisk in front and the label of the Extreme Solid State Drive.
While on both sides are just 4 screw holes for the mounting for the case which is a 2.5″ Drive. It’s very thin and lightweight, actually when it got delivered I thought I got the wrong package because totally you will not notice that inside it is a hard drive.
Now looking at the back is the actual capacity (SDSSDX-240G, +5.0V DC 1.6A), Serial number and certifications. Nothing to advance details within the Hard Drive itself but all of the details can be seen in the dedicated software for SanDisk the SSD Dashboard which unfortunately you need to download it on their official Website here.
Upon checking out of the box the firmware version I got is R201 which is upgradable to R211 and can be easily update using the software that SanDisk provide on their website.
The SSD itself has 2 ports for the SATA connector and the power supply. Look how thing this baby is 🙂
[section label=”Test Machine” anchor=”machine”]
Test Machine
Before we get started on seeing how good it performs here is our base system test machine.
CPUIntel Core i5 4590K ProcessorMOTHERBOARDASUS Z97-PRO WiFi ACCPU COOLERStock Intel CPU FanMEMORYKingston 8GB 1333MhzGRAPHICS CARDASUS STRIX GeForce GTX 970INT. STORAGESanDisk Extreme 240GBPSUAcbel 560DISPLAY22″ AOC E2250Swdn + Coocaa LED TVOSMicrosoft Windows 8.1 Pro 64bit
Many thanks to ASUS for providing the Graphics Card and Motherboard test unit.
The SanDisk Extreme has a total of 240GB capacity but a usable storage of 223GB which is totally not bad having just a 7mb for some cache allocation.
[section label=”Benchmark and Performance” anchor=”benchmark”]
Benchmark and Performance
ATTO Disk Benchmark
The utility was designed to measure regular disk drive performance but it’s more than up to the task of measuring both USB flash drive and SSD speeds as well. The utility measures disk performance rates for various sizes of file and displays the results in a bar chart showing read and write speeds at each file size.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS-SSD is a recent benchmarking application which, as the name suggests, is focused on benchmarking solid state drives. The utility is very similar to the age-old Crystal Disk Mark utility both in the tests it performs and the format of its output. The main advantage of AS-SSD is its ability to measure incompressible data transfer speeds (that is data such as photos or videos which cannot be compressed by the controller). Additionally AS-SSD uses file sizes (large) appropriate to solid state drives which are typically much faster than flash or regular mechanical hard drives.
Crystal Disk Mark
Crystal Disk Mark is a free disk benchmarking utility that is very simple to use. It takes eight measurements: the read and write speeds in megabytes per second (MBps) for sequential, 512KB, random 4KB and 4KB parallel disk operations.
Tera Copy
is a software designed to be used to move or copy computer files. As an alternative to the native copy operations within Windows, it is designed to be faster and have more functionality than the native tool
Left image is copying a 14Gb file Ubisoft Watchdog game took about 4 mins and on the right side is the video .mov files around 4GB took around 1min to copy.
[section label=”Verdict” anchor=”verdict”]
Verdict
Even the SanDisk solid state drive is already a two years old SSD it’s still no doubt have the performance and power comparing to the new generation SSD out in the market right now I was absolutely satisfied with its read and write capabilities.
it’s a huge upgrade on my old WD HDD drive and the difference is way to far loading booting up the PC is blazing fast on a Windows 8.1 Pro in less than 30 seconds it’s already fully booted up. opening and running applications is superb taking just a couple of seconds which you can check out some of the apps I tested here.
The only thing missing with the SSD is the backup tools for migration since the SanDisk software only provides monitoring for updates and SSD status. over all the SanDisk Extreme is still a powerhouse SSD although for some the pricing is really a bit turn off but off since now a days you can buy an SSD with half the price of this one with the same capacity. but then comparing it to other benchmarks from other brands. It still has the performance to out-phase some of the latest models available in the market.
SanDisk did a great job with this SSD consistent design and performance so I am giving the Performance Badge and a 9.5 rating with a Minimalist design award.
