The tech industry has been craving for super fast hard drives since a long time. The Sandisk Extreme 900 is a ray of hope, but something superior is still desired by a lot of people. The 800 Mbps performance is quite good, but a want for more is common among many.
The Extreme 900 looks like just any standard 2.5 inch hard drive. Though not super light and compact, the extreme 900 definitely doesn’t look bad. It is slightly heavy because of some technical reasons. The somewhat large sized hard drive houses NAND based 6 Gbps SATA SSD’s and also facilitates heat dissipation and shock resistance.
The hard drive runs in RAID-0 which makes it possible to churn out performance similar to 10 Gbps ones. The controller and bridge chip that facilitate the functioning of RAID-0 lie inside the hard drive.
Going into details, the PCIe SSD’s and a multi-lane PCIe to USB bridge chip is also a component inside the extreme 900. The port included is the USB-C type connector. The type C to type A, and type C to type C SuperSpeed cables are included in the package.
The advanced USB-C connector technically offers extremely high speeds, but not every data transfer will deliver the rate of 10 Gbps. The Sandisk Extreme 900 comes in different sizes. You can choose from 480 GB, 960 GB, and 1.92 GB variants.
Of course they are advertised as 500 GB, 1TB, and 2TB respectively, but the above mentioned sizes are what is actually offered. The hard drive costs about 5 times when compared to other standard hard drives of the same sizes, but the performance offered is also 5 times.
In the actual world, data rates range from 598 Mbps to 796 Mbps. When the cache is not exceeded, the bigger number is observed. The real life tests measure lower than standard benchmarks, but to be fair, a number of other factors come into play when data is actually read/written.
By default, the hard drive comes formatted in universally readable/writable exFAT. It does offer portability with a wide range of file types, but writing speeds suffer here. When formatted to NTFS, considerable speed boosts can be observes.
For example, a 20 GB bundle of files in various formats will likely take about 4 minutes when the hard drive is formatted to exFAT, but with NTFS formatting, the time can come down to about 90 seconds. Laptops featuring thunderbolt ports are capable of running on 10 Gbps speeds.
The Extreme 900 beats Samsung’s T1 as well T3 by a huge margin. Even in actual situations, the hard drives does deliver data speeds around 794 Mbps. Not to say, he transfer rates largely depend on the type of the ports they are used in as well. In devices featuring USB 3.x ports, data rates close to 800 Mbps are easily observed.
This hard drive is lighting fast. Though it’s a bit pricey, the performance more than covers the cost. Even its closest competitors are behind by at least 200 Mbps of data transfer rates. If you have the bucks to buy a premium class hard drive, the Sandisk Extreme 900 is a very good deal.
Price: AED 650 approx.
