Sandisk Ultra 240GB SATA II Solid State Drive Review

Making something like an SSD look different from the competition can be quite difficult as they all look pretty much the same, are the same size to a certain degree and styling wise is the only area where you can have some fun. SanDisk have certainly made the Ultra look unique with a glossy black curved casing which adds a lot of style and class to the drive, though some may disagree and criticise it to be made like a tin.

Performance wise, it shows why SanDisk are the best at what they do. It may not be the fastest drive on the market, but it was never made to be, especially as it’s a SATA II drive, but it does things a bit differently. It uses a SandForce SF-1200 controller, whereas most new SATA II drives opt for the 2000 series controllers instead. What SanDisk have done though, is utilise their own memory, instead of relying on the usual suspects of Micron, Toshiba or Samsung to name but a few. This shows great potential for the market as another memory chip manufacturer enters the market, allowing for a bit of healthy competition.

You can see that in our testing, the asynchronous memory handled itself very well considering the bad rep that it sometimes gets, but this is all down to the type of tests run and whether it’s compressible or incompressible data that you’re using. Either way, this drive is aimed at the market where consumers wanting their first upgrade to SSD goodness will be blown away none the less.

Taking a look at the price of the drive, we do find it to be quite expensive at almost £300 considering what is actually on offer, and that’s a real shame, but we can only assume that as they are mass produced and if the market take to them, we should find the prices dropping, or at least, that’s what we hope. For £300, there’s nothing stopping you purchasing a super fast SATA III drive, where you will notice quite a big difference.

Why it might seem like we’re knocking the Ultra SSD into the ground, that’s not our intention, but we are trying to be realistic, and whilst it’s not the fastest drive on the market, or the cheapest, we have to look at it from the angle of “it’s another drive in the channel” and it’s good to see SanDisk returning to the market, albeit a little late and with a not so current product, but this could all change and could all change very quickly and for that reason, we’re awarding this our innovation award. Not because of the drive so much, but more behind SanDisk returning to the market and at least giving it a go, so we commend you for that.