SanDisk Extreme 120GB Solid State Drive Review

There are now more drives adopting the new Toshiba 24nm Toggle Flash memory and one of these is from SanDisk. You may remember that we looked at the 240GB Solid State Drive from SanDisk a while back, but it was only aimed at the budget conscious consumer wanting to move to an SSD from a standard mechanical drive due to it’s SATA II speeds.

Today however, we see SanDisk moving up in the market with their Extreme SSD that features Toshiba Toggle Flash memory, with 24nm technology and the famous LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller chip that is used in the majority of drives on the market today.

If we look at any high-end drive on the market, you are likely to find the SandForce SF-2281 controller, with the usual suspects of the Vertex 3 from OCZ and WildFire from Patriot, though the WildFire did things slightly differently due to the memory used.

The WildFire harnessed Toggle Flash memory chips, giving a great collaboration with the SF-2281 controller from LSI and offering some of the best speeds on the market, though SanDisk have now taken things a bit further.

This new Extreme drive from SanDisk is utilising both the SF-2281 SandForce controller, and also Toggle Flash memory, but with a slight difference. The memory used within this SSD is actually 24nm instead of already successful 32nm Toggle Flash that we saw in the WildFire.

Not content on leaving things there, we’re told that 19nm memory chips are already being worked on, and we can only assume that we will see these in the near future in other SanDisk based drives. For now we will focus on the current 24nm offering that we have here and will take a look at the drive in more detail before we jump into the benchmark sections of our review.