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Good news for gamers who don't leave the house: SanDisk debuts 24/7 Extreme PRO SSD
C'mon... don't you think you need a loo break?
+Comment Gamers are told to take note: SanDisk has souped its Extreme line of SATA interface consumer SSDs to the Extreme PRO – which has doubled capacity, slightly increased speed and an eye-catching 10-year warranty.
Last year's Extreme II featured a maximum of 480GB of capacity, random read/write speeds of 95,000/75,000 IOPS (4K), sequential read/write bandwidth of 550/520 MB/sec, SanDisk firmware for its Marvell 88SS9187 controller, and a five-year warranty.
Now we have capacity up to 960GB, 100,000/90,000 random read IOPS, and the same sequential bandwidth. SanDisk stresses these are sustained numbers and not a fresh-out-of-the-box peak. The 6Gbit/s SATA interface stays the same.
How come it gets a doubled warranty period? SanDisk points to over-provisioning. It mentions over-clocking too, which would help the performance, and it says the drive can be used "24/7".
Comment
The company goes a bit bananas over the speed increase, saying: "Graphics-intensive games load in a heartbeat and run blazing fast to keep you immersed in the action."
I'm not sure that the marginal increase in speed justifies this.
Also, a 10-year warranty period means that the device will be well out of date in five years' time. With gamers wanting the fastest possible performance, SanDisk might be optimising the wrong aspect of the drive for gamers; better to go for boosting sustained performance than longevity, surely? Or push its write-intensity support by boosting the PB written, over a five-year warranty.
The thing is intended for PCs and notebooks as well as games consoles. There's a host software dashboard to show the SSD's status, and it uses S.M.A.R.T. support in the drive.
Read a spec of the 960GB model here. SanDisk isn't saying what controller is being used; Seagate is buying the LSI Sandforce line from Avago and Seagate has a Samsung tie-up, which might indicate Sandforce is no longer the controller du jour for SanDisk.
Nor does SanDisk say what kind of flash is being used. We guess it's 19nm MLC. ®