SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD 

Benchmark Results: IOPS are a good bit below the SanDisk specification of 82k on reads and a little above the 39k specification on writes but overall decent performance.

IOPS really doesn't vary as dramatically with reads ranging from 79k to 82k and writes from 29k to 39k.

It does a nice job of moving data quickly without the need for compression to boost performance; however, it does rely on a cache to buffer data as needed which sets it apart from the SandForce drives.

Then, when the drive is idle, the garbage collection routines fire those files into the slower MLC portion of the drive.

The Ultra Plus, however, impresses in the 4K random read/write results and posts the fastest read speeds we've seen and is pushing on for 60MB/s on the writes.

Install Results: The only drive in our comparison slower than the SanDisk Ultra Plus on the 5GB file copy was the budget friendly Kingston V300 drive.

Nor does it carry the same price tag.

That's important because the Samsung 840 250GB drive is retailing for the same price as this SanDisk, and with 6GB less space.

Being able to use it's own memory chips means that SanDisk can price its new drives aggressively and this 256GB Ultra Plus is sitting at the 51p per GB mark.

This is the first time we've seen the Marvell 88SS9175 SATA 6Gb/s capable controller and so far it seems very similar to the 9174 chip.

For the SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB drive, the readout on CrystalDiskInfo 5.2.0 shows that both NCQ and S.M.A.R.T. are enabled, as well as TRIM and the interface is confirmed at SATA III (6Gbps).

However, we can see enough to tell this is a Samsung DDR2 DRAM chip at 128MB capacity.