SanDisk Extreme 120GB SSD Review – Performance at a bargain price

A closer look at the SanDisk Extreme hardware.

Let’s take a look at the hardware found inside the SanDisk Extreme SSD.

PCB

PCB topside

The top of the PCB is sparse to say the least. We can see the familiar SandForce SF-2281 SSD processor, the SATA data and power connectors, and spaces for eight NAND chips.

PCB underside

The underside of the PCB is once again sparsely populated. Since this is the 120GB model, we can see four 24nm toggle mode NAND chip packages, with each package having a capacity of 32GB. Interestingly, the NAND is manufactured by SanDisk themselves.

The SandForce SSD processor

The SSD processor used in the SanDisk Extreme is the popular SandForce SF-2281, designated SF-2281VB1-SDC.

The NAND on the review sample was SanDisk’s own 24nm toggle mode MLC NAND.

SanDisk 24nm toggle mode MLC NAND

There are four 32GB NAND chips onboard giving a total of 128GB of NAND flash memory, and approximately 111GB available to the user once the SSD is partitioned and formatted.

Specifications

As we can see from the specifications, the 240GB model is the fastest.

Drive maintenance features

For Windows 7 users and some distributions of Linux, the SanDisk Extreme SSD supports ATA TRIM to keep the NAND clean. The SanDisk Extreme also has advanced garbage collection to clean the NAND during drive idle periods.

SanDisk SSD Toolkit

From the toolkit the user is able to monitor the SSD health status via SMART, and update the drive’s firmware. However, there is no drive maintenance features from within the toolkit. The SanDisk Extreme does support "internal secure erase". So it is possible to secure erase the drive via a live Linux distribution such as Parted Magic, for example.

Let’s head to the next page where we take a look at our testing methods and the review PC.

 

• Introduction
• Test PC and testing procedures