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

[cryan]

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.

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

 

[Madn3ss795]

Samsung 840's biggest competitor!

 

[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

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[Combat Wombat]

These and the OCZ drives from newegg are looking mighty close in price!
BF4 Rebuild is about to take place

 

[Guest]

@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.

 

[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.

 

[anything4this]

I don't understand the ~500MBs read limit on the drives. Is it an interface bottleneck?

 

[Guest]

I don't understand the ~500MBs read limit on the drives. Is it an interface bottleneck?

yes, it seems ssds connected with sata3, which delivers a theoretical maximum of 6Gbit/s, can't reach much more than 500MB/s. the only alternative is to directly use pcie as an interface like a bunch of enthusiast drives for desktops, and also the new macbook airs, which reach max throughput speeds of ~700MB/s iirc.

 

[cloef]

For anyone interested in the endurance of the SanDisk Ultra Plus there is a test launched at ssdendurancetest.com