Sandisk's Extreme 240GB, not the fastest but certainly the lowest in power consumption

Subject: Storage | November 6, 2012 - 12:15 AM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: sandisk, 240gb, toggle NAND, SF-2181, sandforce, Extreme 240GB

SanDisk has been taking advantage of their long experience in the flash memory market to develop a line of SSDs which, apart from the controller, are all made in house. That way they only have to license a controller, in this case SandForce's 2181, avoiding the costs of developing and improving their own controller. The cost might be a bit high at $215 when you compare it to some of the deals currently available on the previous generation of SSDs. [H]ard|OCP saw better performance than they expected from the older SF-2181 but still not to the level of the current generation of controllers. What helped make this particular drive more attractive was the Toolkit which makes updating your firmware quite easy and remarkably low power consumption.

"The SanDisk Extreme 240GB is SanDisk's SandForce-powered SSD. Featuring Toggle Mode NAND and the SF-2181 with the latest firmware we give the SanDisk Extreme a spin. How does it stand up to its enthusiast competitors in terms of steady state and out of the box performance?"

Here are some more Storage reviews from around the web:

Storage

Source: [H]ard|OCP

The Vertex series returns to it's roots with the Indilinx infused Everest 2 controller

Subject: Storage | October 7, 2012 - 03:05 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: ocz, Vertex 4, indilinx everest 2, ssd, 240gb, Marvell 9145

The Vertex 4 series from OCZ will end up being an intermediary controller between the old Marvell 9145 based Indilinx design which OCZ now owns and a new controller that is being designed in house by OCZ and the Indilinx team which came as part of the acquisition. That doesn't mean this drive should be avoided, the prices are quite good with the 512GB model being one of the most affordable new drives on the market. [H]ard|OCP's testing had it performing at the top of the pack in many benchmarks and the drive comes with a 5 year warranty so you are getting quite a lot for a relatively low price.

"The Vertex 4 is a departure from OCZ's tried and true model of using third party controllers and firmware for its SSDs. Taking control of the firmware with the Vertex 4 gives OCZ the ability to tune the SSDs for speed and performance at lower queue depths and optimize for low latency. We test to see if the Everest 2 Platform delivers."