TAIPEI, TAIWAN -- Looks like there's a new contender for the high-performance SSD upgrade crown. Not content to let such other players as Samsung -- whose 840 Series is our current speed champ -- dominate the high-end of the market, SanDisk has fired the latest volley with its new Extreme II SSD, a solid state drive that promises eye-popping performance and an incredibly long duty cycle.
Available in 120, 240 and 480GB capacities, the SanDisk Extreme II is one of the only drives on the market powered by a Marvell 88SS9187 controller and combines that high performance chip with its own custom firmware. The drive uses SanDisk's 19nm NAND Flash and employs its unique nCache 2 write cache, which pools many write operations together in a small layer of speedy SLC Flash memory before writing them to disk.
Because of its firmware, memory and nCache, SanDisk says the Extreme II can provide read and write transfer rates of 550 MBps and 510 MBps with 95,000 and 78,000 IOPS respectively. Perhaps more importantly, the drive is rated to write 80TB of data over its lifetime, allowing users to perform huge file transfers without worrying that they'll run out of write cycles. SanDisk even backs the Extreme II with a 5-year warranty.
The SanDisk Extreme II is available starting today at MSRPs of $129.99, $239.99, and $439.99 at 120GB, 240GB and 480GB instances, respectively. We look forward to giving this drive a thorough test and seeing how it stands up to the competition.
