SanDisk SSD PLUS 240GB
The little SSD that can
THIS THING HAS NO RIGHT being any good. Price-wise, it’s right at the bottom of the food chain, and you absolutely know it from the moment you crack open the packaging. It feels hideously light and hollow.
There’s no iFixit-style teardown for these reviews, but we suspect that if you prized open the flimsy plastic chassis, you’d find almost nothing but air. The PCB will be tiny. That’s partly because this drive is one of a new breed of what’s sometimes known as “DRAM-less” SSDs.
This drive uses Silicon Motion’s SM2246XT controller, which is low cost, thanks to omitting a DRAM memory controller. The controller still has some internal SRAM cache, but on paper the SSD PLUS looks like a cornercutting exercise. At least, it does save for one detail: It’s a SanDisk drive, and SanDisk doesn’t usually ruin its drives with bad corner-cutting decisions. Then you spot the MLC rather than TLC NAND memory. Things are looking up.
Of the really low-cost drives here, the SSD PLUS is the only one that can sustain full write speeds for extended periods. In fact, it doesn’t suffer from any conspicuous performance nasties. OK, its peak performance is miles away from the PCIe hotness delivered by some of the snazziest SSDs. Indeed, depending on which benchmark you choose, it’s a fair way behind the quicker SATA SSDs, such as the Samsung 850 Pro, too. But consider this: If your file copying takes nearly three minutes instead of just under two and a half, will you notice? Probably not. What might bother you is if it takes over six minutes.
In practice, this bargain basement drive gives a subjective user experience that you’d probably struggle to pick from premium SATA drives. There will be exceptions to that. If you routinely rely on applications that make heavy use of your storage, paying a little extra for a premium SATA drive or making that big jump to an NVMeenabled PCI Express drive can certainly be worthwhile. But for most of us, most of the time, this SanDisk SSD PLUS gets the job done. It’s good enough at a great price.
SanDisk SSD PLUS 240GB
FOREST GUMP Keeps on trucking; sometimes on sale for super cheap.
WORTHLESS CHUMP Low-spec hardware; mediocre sequential throughput.
$65, www.sandisk.com