SanDiskUltra II SSD review: A new level of SSD affordability

The SanDisk Ultra II SSD delivers the goods as a budget solid-state drive (SSD).

8.0

SanDiskUltra II SSD

$38 at Amazon

The Good

The SanDisk Ultra II SSD delivers good performance, and its high-capacity versions are currently the most affordable on the market. The drive includes helpful software.

The Bad

The drive's 120GB version is comparatively expensive. The three-year warranty is not as long as might be expected.

The Bottom Line

With the lowest pricing on the market, the SanDisk Ultra II is an excellent upgrade for your aging computer.

While the Ultra II isn't the fastest SSD I've seen, nor does it have the longest warranty, the drive has enough performance and features to be an excellent deal for those looking to upgrade an aging computer that's still running on a regular hard drive.

If you have a computer that already runs on an SSD and you want to upgrade to an even faster drive, check out this list of top SSDs on the market for alternatives.

A SanDisk drive first: TLC NAND flash memory

The Ultra II is a standard 2.5-inch 7mm-thick internal drive, looking very similar to the Ultra Plus or even the new Extreme Pro that came out a few months ago.

On the inside, however, it's very different from its older brothers, being the first drive from SanDisk that uses the company's second-generation 19nm Triple Level Cell (TLC) flash memory. Prior to this, TLC NAND flash memory was mostly used in Samsung's drives, such as the Samsung 840 .

In a nutshell, TLC flash memory allows the memory cells to stack up vertically, which in turn packs more storage into the same space. This means the SSD is now cheaper to make but has slower performance and shorter endurance -- the total amount of data that can be written to the drive before it become unreliable -- than other types of memory, including Multiple Level Cell (MLC) and Single Level Cell (SLC).

SanDisk, however, says that its firmware, combined with the Marvell 88SS9187 controller, will still make the Ultra II perform well and provide high endurance. However, unlike the case of the Extreme Pro, SanDisk doesn't provide a specific endurance rating for the Ultra II. But the included three-year warranty generally means that you won't have any problem with it within at least the first three years.

nCache 2.0 technology

The Ultra II is equipped with SanDisk's nCache 2.0 tech, a new caching architecture that converts a portion of the drive's TLC flash memory to SLC mode, thus offering better performance and reliability. This means the drive can deliver much faster peak performance than it would normally without nCache. SanDisk says nCache 2.0 will also help deliver consistent performance with low energy consumption.

The drive also includes SanDisk Dashboard software that allows users to monitor and manage the drive's features, as well as contacting the company's customer support via Live Chat. On top of that, the software also provides links to download Apricorn's EZ GIG IV for drive cloning, and Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ to protect the system from malware, both for free.

New low in SSD pricing

For a long time, SSDs were priced at around $1 per gigabyte, but in recent months, the price has dropped to around half of that. Now with the Ultra II, for the first time you can get a 960GB SSD in the US for just $380, or 40 cents per gigabyte. Other than the 120GB capacity that costs $80 ($0.67 per gigabyte), the rest of the Ultra II's capacities are currently the most affordable on the market.

In most cases, it's in fact cheaper than the ARC 100 series from OCZ , which used to be the cheapest on the market. With the Ultra II, SSD pricing has gotten to a new low, which is always a great news for consumers.

Performance

Considering its low cost, the Ultra II's performance was quite impressive. I tested the drive both as a secondary drive in a computer as well as the main drive that hosted the operating system.

As a secondary drive, it registered a sustained real-world data transferring speed of 310MBps for writing and 310MBps for reading. When used as a main drive and performing both writing and reading at the same time, it, however, scored just 127MBps. Overall, it was below average when compared to recently reviewed drives, but most of these are high-end drives, however.

In tests using the PCMark benchmark suite, the drive also did as expected. It has slightly higher storage bandwidth than that of the OCZ ARC 100.

And finally, in application testing, the Ultra II offered much improvement when compared with a conventional hard drive. Compared with other high-end SSDs, it was slightly slower, though not by much.

Note that you need to use the Ultra II in a computer that supports SATA 3 (6Gbps) to get the best performance out of it. However, considering its low cost, the drive will still make a great upgrade for an older computer that supports SATA 2 (3Gbps).

Conclusion

Pricing has always been one the most important factors in buying an SSD, and SanDisk delivers in this regard with the Ultra II. It's the first on the market that a cost as low as just 40 cents per gigabyte.

The new drive is also SanDisk's first step in the TLC SSD market, which has been dominated by Samsung. This opens up the competition and means that, going forward, the price of SSDs will be likely to go down even further.

While the Ultra II isn't the fastest on the market, it has enough power to make a significant improvement to any computer that currently runs on a regular hard drive. For this reason, instead of spending a few hundred dollars for a new budget computer, upgrading your aging one with a 240GB Ultra II SSD for $108 will be a much better investment that, for the most part, will return the type of performance you need.