With the Extreme II SanDisk doubled the amount of spare area on the drive, which could impact the size of the nCache. In the Ultra Plus, I pointed out that there simply wasn’t much NAND allocated to the nCache since it is pulled from the ~7% spare area on the drive. The nCache is used as a lower latency/higher performance write buffer. This is standard 2-bit-per-cell MLC NAND with a twist: a portion of each MLC NAND die is set to operate in SLC/pseudo-SLC mode. Rounding out the nearly vertical integration is the use of SanDisk’s 19nm eX2 ABL MLC NAND. SanDisk also rolls its own firmware, a combination we’ve seen in previous SanDisk SSDs (e.g. Like Crucial’s M500, the Extreme II uses Marvell’s 88SS9187 (codename Monet) controller. This new drive however moves to a much more favorable combination for companies who have their own firmware development team. The previous generation SanDisk Extreme SSD used a SandForce controller, with largely unchanged firmware. Unfortunately, SanDisk did little to push the envelope on performance, and definitely did nothing to prioritize IO consistency. Low power consumption, competitive pricing and solid validation kept SanDisk in the good graces of the OEMs. The U100 and U110 are quite common in Ultrabooks, and more recently even Apple adopted SanDisk as a source for its notebooks. Much like Samsung in the early days of SSDs, SanDisk is best known for its OEM efforts. The SanDisk part is very unexpected, because until now SanDisk hadn’t really put out a very impressive drive. This is that SSD, and surprisingly enough, it’s made by SanDisk. A few weeks ago I mentioned on twitter that I had a new favorite SSD.

Sandisk ssd u100 lifespan