SanDisk’s new Ultra Plus Solid State Drive (128 GB) is an upgrade over the the company’s Ultra range of SSDs. The Ultra Plus is aimed at those who are looking at upgrading their hard disk drives on PCs or laptops, by moving onto SSDs. The drive is housed in a 7mm aluminum chasis, and comes with a premium finish.
The drive also accompanies a 2.5mm framing that can be used in order to install the drive in places where standard 9.5mm internal drives are used. The Ultra Plus uses a SATA 6Gb/s interface and is powered by a Marvell 9175 controller with in-house SanDisk firmware and SanDisk’s 19nm MLC NAND.
The drive is currently available in three storage capacities: 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB. We received the 128GB variation for review. SanDisk claims that this SSD delivers sequential read speeds of up to 530 megabytes per second (MB/s) and sequential write speeds of up to 290 MB/s. Let’s find out how the Ultra Plus scores in real world tests.
In order to test the sequentional performance of the SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD, we ran IOMeter as the benchmark. The SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD measured 485MB/s read and 420MB/s write speeds. When we switched over to a random 2MB transfer test, the speeds dropped a bit, measuring in at 340MB/s for read and 275MB/s for write.
We also used the Ultra Plus SSD as the main drive on our test bed, and found out that the drive did help in improving the overall performance of the machine. We loaded the operating system onto the SSD and we were able to clock a boot up time of just 12 seconds and about 6 seconds to shut down. This is indeed much faster than what we experienced, when we used a hard drive as the primary drive on our test bed.
The SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD impresses with good data transfer rates and speedy access times when used as a primary drive for PCs or laptops. If you are someone looking to move away from hard disk drives over to SSDs for a storage upgrade, the SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD could be one of your choices.
Price: $120 Approx.
