Sandisk Extreme II 240GB review

The Sandisk Extreme II is the company’s latest SSD range, and is available in capacities of 120GB, 240GB and 480GB. It’s a shame there isn’t a 960GB or 1TB option for those who need lots of storage, though.

The Extreme II SSD has a 2.5in form factor, a SATA3 connector and is 7.5mm thick, so it’ll fit in ultra-portable laptops that originally came with single platter hard disks. However, the Extreme II also comes with an adaptor that lets you fit it within laptops that would otherwise only accept 9mm disks. It won’t fit inside most Ultrabooks, though, as many use SSDs with an mSATA connector and a much smaller form factor. Check that it fits your laptop before you buy.

All Extreme II SSDs use 19nm MLC NAND flash and the Marvell 88SS9187 controller. We’ve seen the latter in other SSDs, such as the Crucial M500. The M500 performed brilliantly in our tests, so we expected great results from our 240GB Extreme II. We weren’t disappointed; large files were written at a blistering 487.8MB/s and read at 414.3MB/s. Small file performance was also very fast, with write speeds of 151.6MB/s and read speeds of 80.4MB/s.

The Extreme II is a very fast SSD. Its large file performance exceeds that of our Best Buy award-winning SSD, the Crucial M500, by around 14MB/s overall. The Crucial M500 is faster than the Extreme II in our benchmarks when copying small files, but only by a mere 6MB/s overall.

The drives are also similarly-priced. The Extreme II is 69p per gigabyte, while the 240GB version of the Crucial M500 is a slightly cheaper 63p per gigabyte. One clear advantage the Extreme II does have is its warranty. At five years, it’s two years longer than Crucial’s three year warranty.

The Extreme II has excellent performance and a long warranty, and we think it’s worth the small premium over Crucial’s 240GB M500. It wins a Best Buy award.