SanDisk Ultra II 240GB review

The SanDisk’s name makes it sound like a high-end drive, but that’s deceptive – its £80 price and 240GB capacity means it costs only 33p per gigabyte, making it one of the cheapest big-name SSDs you can buy.

It’s the first SanDisk drive to use TLC NAND, and the first consumer drive to use this type of memory aside from Samsung. The chips used here are 19nm parts – a process node less than half the size of Samsung’s 40nm silicon. Elsewhere, SanDisk uses a Marvell-made controller.

The TLC NAND is chosen for its price more than its performance, but the Ultra punched above its weight in many of the benchmarks we ran. In AS SSD’s sequential read and write tests, the SanDisk scored 505MB/sec and 473MB/sec – not enough pace to trouble the Samsung 850 Pro, but within touching distance of more expensive rivals.

It’s also a better performer than other budget SSDs. In some of ATTO’s smaller read tests the SanDisk was twice as quick as affordable rivals, and it peaked at 558MB/sec – barely any slower than market-leading products. The Ultra proved even better when writing files; it topped out at 506MB/sec, which is a great result for a drive this cheap.

Meanwhile, in the Anvil test suite, its 4MB sequential read pace of 522MB/sec is among the best we’ve seen and its 475MB/sec write speed is decent, too.

In other areas, the SanDisk’s budget origins are more obvious. In IOMeter its total I/O figure of 1,843 is one of the poorest scores we’ve recorded, and its maximum I/O response time of 52ms is several times slower than the best SSDs.

For the money, though, the SanDisk Ultra II 240GB is very impressive. It stays in touch with top SSDs in some benchmarks, and in almost every test it’s quicker and more consistent than its similarly priced rivals. Crucial’s MX100 was once the budget king, but now SanDisk’s Ultra II has seized that crown.