SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB SSD Review

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by Robert Tanner on July 29, 2013 in Storage

Enthusiast SSDs may get all of the fame and glory, but it’s the value brands that always sell the most drives. As a relative newcomer that doesn’t rely on SandForce controllers like many other vendors do, can SanDisk’s Marvell-equipped Ultra Plus deliver that “Ultra” good value we’re looking for?

Page 3 – Synthetic: PCMark 7

Futuremark’s PCMark benchmarking suite should need no introduction; it has been a staple of PC benchmarks for the better half of a decade. It includes over 25 individual workloads designed to measure all aspects of system performance and gives individual scores in each test as well as an overall system performance score for easy system comparisons.

PCMark 7 offers a more accurate measure of performance as compared to its predecessor, PCMark Vantage. The storage scoring metrics especially were significantly re-tuned and optimized with SSDs in mind to give a more balanced disk subsystem score.

PCMark 7 Professional

SanDisk’s Ultra Plus does well in the PCMark 7 benchmarks, keeping a tight grouping, and being able to easily hold its own against several budget SandForce clones. Intriguingly, despite the Ultra Plus being a 4-channel design, it is even able to go toe-to-toe against the Crucial m4 in these results, which utilized an 8-channel Marvell controller inside. This undoubtedly is in part due to SanDisk’s aforementioned nCache solution – quite impressive.

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