SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD
Right off the bat I liked two things about this drive: It's extremely light (it only weighs 1.37 oz.) and it's cheap -- as in very inexpensive. The Ultra Plus comes in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities. OnSanDisk's site, they sell for $75, $110 and $210, respectively. The 256GB Ultra Plus -- which is the one I tested for this review -- was selling for $170 on Thursday on Amazon, although the price as of today is $216.
As I've said in past reviews, there is no single upgrade that will give you a bigger bang for the buck than an SSD, and it's all the better when it's an inexpensive one.
The Ultra Plus is a 2.5-in drive that uses multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash and a SATA 3.0, 6Gbps drive interface. If you don't have the very latest laptop or desktop model, you are likely still using a SATA 2.0, 3Gbps drive interface, so the SSD won't perform quite as well for some applications. (The AppleMacBook Pro I tested the drive on has the latest SATA drive dock; more information about my test machine is in the next section.)
When SanDisk announced the Ultra Plus, the company also announced an upgrade to its NAND flash density: it went from 24-nanometer (nm) lithography to 19nm with the drive, which may account for the low price. The smaller the technology used for the semiconductor, the fewer chips are needed to build a drive.
The Ultra Plus sips power, using just 0.12 watts when active.
Performance testing
SanDisk's specification sheet (PDF) states that the Ultra Plus has sequential read speeds of up to 530MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 445MB/s. Top random read speed clocks in at up to 82,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) and random write speed maxes out at 39,000 IOPS. As always, those speeds vary greatly depending on the system and apps that are being used.
For the benchmark tests, I used an Apple MacBook Pro running OS X Mountain Lion, with 4GB of RAM and a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 processor. To measure data read/write performance, I used Blackmagic Disk Speed Testbenchmark software.
The Ultra Plus SSD displayed blazing fast read/write performance -- among the fastest speeds I've seen on a consumer SSD. For reads, the SSD clocked in with 433MB/s; for writes, the drive reached 339MB/s., not as fast as SanDisk's spec sheet promised but still very impressive.
With the Ultra Plus installed, my MacBook Pro booted in just 14 seconds, which isn't bad. (Interestingly, the time it took to shut down was a bit surprising. While, in my experience, SSDs typically shut down in under 10 seconds, my laptop took a whopping 24 seconds to shut down with the Ultra Plus installed. )
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