The SanDisk Ultra Plus is unusually affordable by SSD standards. Instead of employing a high-end controller, this 256GB drive makes use of the Marvell 9175 – an upgraded version of the chip used in the Crucial M4, which first appeared in 2011.
SanDisk has written its own firmware for the controller, and it’s tweaked the 19nm NAND: while most is MLC, a portion of the drive runs in SLC mode, which aids small-file performance.
In our benchmarks, the Ultra Plus returned mixed results. Scores of 502MB/sec and 447MB/sec in AS SSD’s sequential read and write tests put the SanDisk squarely behind the Samsung and OCZ drives, but performance with smaller files was more erratic. The Ultra Plus raced through AS SSD’s 4K file read test at 32MB/sec, which is the second-best result here, while its 4K write score of 85MB/sec saw it drop behind the pricier Samsung and OCZ drives. The SanDisk also languished at the bottom of our results table in all of CrystalDiskMark’s small-file write tests.
SanDisk’s Ultra Plus can’t challenge top-tier SSDs for absolute performance, but, at 54p-per-gigabyte, it’s great value. If you’re looking for a decent SSD on the cheap, this is the one to buy.
Specifications | |
|---|---|
| Capacity | 256GB |
| Hard disk usable capacity | 238GB |
| Hard disk type | SSD |
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