Extreme Pro

$ 413 San Disk

While the Samsung 850 Pro may have priced itself out of these pages, San Disk’s latest Extreme Pro drive just manages to scrape in. It too is a very pricey drive, especially in a market where the cost of ownership is seemingly dropping every time you blink. But it isn’t quite as expensive as Samsung’s latest and it’s almost as fast—which makes it the absolute fastest drive in this test.

Part of the reason the Extreme Pro is so fast is also part of the reason it’s so much more expensive. Even though San Disk is using its own memory, it’s using low-density 64G bit NAND modules. That means it’s squeezing a lot of memory chips into the drive to reach that 512GB capacity . That’s expensive, but because of the increased parallelism it also boosts the performance of the drive as a whole.

San Disk has created its own firmware to go with the Marvell controller, and has been making a lot of noise about both the consistency of the Extreme Pro’s performance and its longevity. Consistency has been an important selling point for SSDs after it was found that the performance of the earlier designs seriously degraded over time.

Long life is also important. SSD memory can only be written to a finite number of times, but San Disk has taken the hitherto unprecedented step of backing its latest SSD with a massive ten year warranty. That’s quite a show of confidence in a market where three years is the norm.

The Extreme Pro is thus a smart choice, but so much more expensive that it’s a tough choice too. If you can afford it, it’s a match for any SATA SSD out there.