SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD (256GB) - A Marvell Alternative
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Introduction
The Shift to Marvell
Mention SanDisk and you are likely to think of USB flashdrives and memory cards. The company hasn’t really been strong in the SSD space (from a marketing perspective) but they are looking to change that by providing consumers with a variety of options.
Recently, we reviewed their flagship SanDisk Extreme SSD in our Great High-end SSD Shootout, and we found it to be an excellent drive, delivering good performance at an attractive price. On the other end of the scale, we also reviewed their ReadyCache SSD companion drive that greatly speeds up any system still running on mechanical hard drives for a relatively low cost.
Today, we are looking at another drive from SanDisk, the Ultra Plus. There are a couple of differences between the Ultra Plus and the Extreme SSD series of drives. While the Extreme drives are driven by the very popular SandForce SF-2281 controller, SanDisk has instead chosen to go with Marvell for the Ultra Plus drives. In this case, the controller of choice is the fairly new Marvell SS889175.
This controller is not entirely different from the more popular Marvell 88SS9174. In fact, it can best be described as being a light version of the 88SS9174. While the 88SS9174 is often complemented with 512MB of DRAM, the 88SS9175 as fitted in the SanDisk Ultra Plus has to make do with just 128MB. Furthermore, this controller has just four independent NAND channels (the 88SS9174 supports up to eight), which should hamper random access performance. Naturally this meant that the memory chips in this 256GB drive are of 64GB density each. The memory chips used are SanDisk’s own 19nm MLC NAND memory. If you remember, the SanDisk Extreme drives are fitted with SanDisk's faster Toggle-Mode MLC NAND. Factoring all this information, we expect the SanDisk Ultra Plus to be a slower performer than most of the other drives we've recently tested.
Here’s a quick look at the drive.
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