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

 

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

As well as performing SSD endurance tests. Anvil’s Storage Utilities has a very nice SSD benchmarking application. The SSD benchmark tests many different aspects of SSD performance, including 4K random at different queue depths, and also sequential performance, but more importantly than this, all using real test data.

Another very nice feature of Anvil’s SSD benchmark is the fact that you can change the compression levels of the test data. The compression levels of the data sets used for the tests can be varied from 0% compression right up to 100% compressed data, and there are even a few data profiles already included, such as database (8%) compression, and also an application profile (46%) compression, which is designed to simulate real application data being read and written to the SSD.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities is still in beta at the moment, but the application is currently solid enough to use in this article, and I have already verified the results obtained using an SATA analyser.

I will include a screenshot of the review drive, and all comparison results will be presented in the form of graphs. If you would like to see screenshots of the test results obtained on the other SSDs in this article, you can do so by following the link here.

I will also be testing three different compression profiles, which are as follows.

• 0 fill (100% compressible data)
• Application simulation profile (46% compressed)
• 100% (non compressible data)

 So let’s begin the tests.

0 fill

SanDisk Extreme 120GB (0 fill)

Total score

Writing score

Reading score

With a total score of 3819.52, the SanDisk Extreme is about middle of the pack.

Application profile

SanDisk Extreme 120GB SSD (application profile)

Total score

Writing score

Reading score

With data that isn’t so easily compressible, the SanDisk Extreme begins to struggle a little bit, but is still in front of the ever popular Crucial M4 256GB SSD.

100% incompressible

SanDisk Extreme 120GB SSD (100% incompressible)

Total score

Writing score

Read score

With test data that can’t be compressed at all, the SanDisk Extreme 120GB SSD is once again struggling to keep pace with the higher capacity SandForce SF-2281 based SSDs. However, it is still performing fairly well in this test.

Summary

One should keep in mind that although Anvil’s Storage Utilities SSD benchmark is a very good benchmark, and tests many aspects of SSD performance, ultimately it is demonstrating which SSD is technically the fastest, and this may not be showing (for example) which drive will be fastest in the real world with a home user’s work pattern.

The SanDisk Extreme has performed well, but it can’t quite keep pace with most of the larger capacity SSDs.

 

Now let’s head to the next page for some real world tests….

 

• IOMeter test results
• Real world tests