SanDisk Extreme 500

A SOLID STATE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH.

WE GAVE THE SanDisk Extreme 500 a score of 4.5 back in 2016 (see TechLife #56, p48), but its slower read and write speeds drag it down against newer offerings. The flat, diamond-shaped SanDisk Extreme 500 might have been overtaken by a slew of portable SSDs, but its still significantly faster than any dual HDD fast drive we’ve seen. It’s also still rather thin compared to the competition, measuring a little over a centimeter thick. Sandisk was one of the first to market the shock resistant characteristic inherent in SSDs by pitching the Extreme 500 as an ultra portable rugged drive. This pocket sized portable drive performs in line with what should be expected from real world tests of fast flash drives recording sequential read speeds of 335MB/s and write speeds of 283.6MB/s. Unfortunately these speeds slow to around the 200MB/s mark using the modern Q32T1 sequential speed tests, and the drive hasn’t dropped in price at all since launch.