The SanDisk X400 1TB SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on May 6, 2016 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here.
The scores on the Light test are not spread as widely as for the more intense ATSB tests, and the SLC caching capabilities of several of the drives come in handy. The X400's average data rate puts it in the middle of the pack, but its good full-drive performance distinguishes it from the other planar TLC drives and makes it tied against several MLC drives.
The average service time of the X400 is slightly worse than average for this bunch of drives, and it isn't able to score a clear win against any MLC drives on this metric.
The latency outliers above 10ms highlight the planar TLC drives as slower than most MLC drives, but the X400 doesn't do a particularly bad job of keeping latency low.
Once again the X400 comes in third for overall power efficiency (almost tied for second place), and this time there is a fairly clear gap between it and fourth place.
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Margalus - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
It uses less power than some, and is priced lower. But it seems performance is severely lacking..jabber - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
This just shows what a fantastic budget SSD the BX100 was. Crucial were stupid to dump it.Mixal11 - Sunday, May 8, 2016 - link
Exactly, for me it's v300 for low end desktop, BX100 for laptops (hard to get over time) and Sandisk Extreme Pro or 850 Pro for high end. I avoid TLC, because of experience with Dell Samsung 841oem. Who knows if I can read data from it after year or two. TLC drives are great to reduce ssd prices.jabber - Sunday, May 8, 2016 - link
Yeah everyone moaned about the V300's back in the day but they are perfect SSDs for putting in SATA II kit as they push 285+MBps all day long...plus they are the cheapest you can buy usually. Also I have bought dozens of them and not one has yet failed. They are a solid tough little SSD. I shall be sorry when they go.jhh - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I wonder if they have included any of the increased endurance technology from their Smart Storage (formerly part of Smart Modular) acquisition. The idea behind the technology was that most cells didn't need full current to program, and when programmed with less than full current, that the cell would allow more write/erase cycles.Michael Bay - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
Goddamn it, one more terabyte.Just one.
Samus - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I think if I were shopping for a TLC drive I'd stick with Sandisk too. I haven't had any issues with their Ultra II's, although many people have. I have, however, had two ADATA SP550's fail (a 120GB and 240GB) one during a power failure in a laptop (BSOD) which a secure erase recovered usability of the drive, and another within an hour of installation - cloning about 100GB of data to it killed it an no longer detects by BIOS.I have 5 or so other SP550's in the field running fine though, but none of them have suffered the "abuse" of the above cases.
I have dozens of Mushkin drives out there, even ECO2's, all running incredibly well. I have a few ECO3 TLC drives in house about to go out, but I've been avoiding them because the ECO2 is still available.
On a side note, I still have 840EVO's coming in at least bi-weekly with basically unusable performance. Samsung is hell to deal with for RMA (a stark contrast to, say, OCZ that actually sends you an advanced replacement!) and nothing I can do revives performance in these drives. Secure erase, fill and trim, etc, nothing works. Even after a fresh OS install they read at half the speed they write. It's crazy, slower than a 2.5" hard disk.
ladder_to_heaven - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
Win 8.1 - STILL? -For the love of god WHY?
Billy Tallis - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
Switching to Windows 10 would require re-testing a lot of drives, monopolizing the testbed for a month. It'll probably happen at some point this year, but I'll need to put together a second system for it (hopefully a Skylake system with working PCIe power management).jabber - Saturday, May 7, 2016 - link
Yeah no rush, after all 85% of 10's code is...8.1.