SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB

This big, expensive drive is no slower than its competitors, but a high price and low write endurance count against it

SanDisk was one of two manufacturers who supplied capacious 1TB drives this month, the other being Western Digital. Nominally, the two drives are targeted at quite different markets. The WD Blue is a mainstream solid-state drive, with a price to match (the 1TB version costs £269). The SanDisk Extreme Pro, on the other hand, is very much positioned as a premium drive – something that’s certainly reflected in the much steeper price.

As we’ve seen repeatedly during this month’s Labs, however, the SATA interface is a great leveller. These days, even a fairly cheap SSD can easily saturate the connection. You can invest in high-end flash memory and fancy custom controllers all you like, but transfer speeds won’t get any higher. And so, the Extreme Pro yields performance that’s all but identical to the Western Digital.

Despite the “Pro” branding, the SanDisk also lacks hardware encryption, and write endurance is relatively poor – the drive’s rated for a measly 80TBW. That may have been par for the course when the Extreme Pro was introduced back in 2014, but it doesn’t really cut the mustard today: the WD Blue in the same capacity promises a whopping 400TBW. Indeed, the Extreme Pro’s only real advantage over the WD Blue is its ten-year warranty. That’s not an unwelcome bonus, but it’s nowhere near enough to redeem this unexceptional, overpriced SSD.