Today we’ll be taking a quick look at the SanDisk Extreme PRO 500GB M.2 NVMe 3D SSD. It utilizes SanDisk’s own custom 8-channel, 3-Core controller along with its own 64L TLC NAND chips. It also comes with 512GB DDR3 cache ram, and offers read speeds of up to 3,400 MB/s with a write speed of 2,500 MB/s. According to SanDisk, the Extreme PRO 500GB M.2 NVMe 3D can delivers up to 500,000 random-read IOPS. Simply put … this M.2 SSD is blazingly fast.
I would like to thank Hornington Computers for providing this review sample! Let us see what they have to say about SanDisk on their website:
For more than 27 years, SanDisk has been transforming digital storage with breakthrough products and ideas that push the boundaries of what’s possible. Our flash memory technologies are used by many of the world’s leading data centers, embedded in the most advanced smartphones, tablets, and laptops, and are trusted by consumers around the world. From handheld devices to hyper-scale data centers, SanDisk is expanding the possibilities of storage.
SanDisk-branded products are used by top electronics companies and can be found in enterprise data centers worldwide, so consumers can be confident their important data is at their fingertips.
Confused and NAND flash memory? Well, there are several types of NAND flash memory used in most of today’s SSDs. The two most popular are SLC and MLC, and now TLC. Here’s a little background taken from Tomsitpro.
SLC — Single Level Cell: the most expensive, longest lived (high P/E), and generally fastest. Bits are stored only as 2 voltage levels, or a “1” or “0.” In SLC less data is stored per cell, so the per unit storage cost is higher.
MLC — Multi-Level Cell: is consumer grade and used in phones, cameras, and USB sticks. The stored charge in MLC may be interpreted as a variety of values, 0 to 3, or 4 possible states, and may store 2 bits. With shorter lifetimes, usually 10x less than SLC, the advantage of this memory is that the cost is 2- 4x less than SLC, but with lower write speeds. MLC typically uses some form of error correction code per block.
eMLC — Enterprise (grade) Multi-Level Cell: is MLC with longer life, usually because of an advanced controller operating the cell and error recovery techniques, construction density, or some combination of the two. Violin has an interesting explanation of the practical differences between NAND types here.
TLC — Triple Level Cell: championed by Samsung, TLC has higher power and error correction requirements, and higher wear levels. TLC is targeted at environments with predominant read uses, and has not been commonly used.
It will be interesting to see how the SanDisk Extreme PRO NVMe with its own controller, will perform against the Adata XPG SX8000 which uses the super fast Silicon Motion SM2262G controller.
I’m expecting the SanDisk Extreme PRO NVMe to offer super fast speeds for both read and write operations. I have a feeling it could be one of the fastest NVMe SSDs we’ll get to test in our labs.
You can buy the SanDisk Extreme PRO 500GB M.2 NVMe 3D SSD
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