KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
The SanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB drive ships in a small but colourful little box. The product name and some specifications are clearly visible.
The bundle includes a 2.5mm adapter drive mount, literature on the product and information on the SanDisk SSD Dashboard software (which currently only supports Windows operating systems).
The drive is black from the front, with a focus on the company and product name. The rear sticker contains some technical data on the product. This sticker needs removed to get access to the drive inside.
The chassis is 7mm tall, meaning it is an ideal solution for the newest raft of super slim Ultraportable laptop systems. The drive weighs 61g.
The chassis actively cools the cache, controller and NAND memory. Only one side of the PCB is populated. The other side is more interesting.
Sandisk are using the Marvel 88SS9187 controller with 19nm MLC NAND flash. The 480GB drive has eight 64gb chips.
The Extreme Pro utilises the SanDisk nCache Pro feature – as part of the caching system. This tiered caching system supports a unique feature to improve random write performance and enhance long term reliability.
The SanDisk SSD has three storage layers:
- Volatile cache – DDR DRAM cache
- nCache – A non-volatile flash write cache
- Mass storage – MLC NAND flash.
The reason for this? Research quoted by SanDisk indicates that a modern operating system will primarily access the storage device using small access blocks, with the majority being 4KB in size. The small logical access blocks are said to conflict with the physical block structure (>1MB) for the newer generation flash memory technology.
Sandisk hold 32GB aside for overprovisioning and use by the nCache. When formatted, you have access to 446GB in the operating system.
The nCache is used to accumulate small writes at high speed and then flush, while consolidating them to the larger MLC sections of the NAND flash memory array.
The Extreme Pro also has support for DEVSLP however it doesn't support IEEE-1667 or TGC Opal 2.0 encryption standards. Samsung offer that with their latest 850 PRO drives.
