SanDisk Unveils Z410 15nm SSD

As one of the major NAND producers along with their partner Toshiba, SanDisk SSDs have been among the best and most common out there. In recent years, the pursuit of better GB per dollar has become paramount over pure performance. In light of the changing dynamic, SanDisk has released another SSD that targets just enough performance with enough capacity for most users, the Z410.

Unlike the Z400s that came before, the new Z410 uses 15nm TLC instead of 15nm MLC. Even with the performance penalty incurred and the use of more power-hungry TLC, SanDisk claims one of the lowest power consumptions for the Z410. The new drive reportedly builds on the Z400s platform. That drive used the budget SMI SM2246XP so the logical SMI controller to use with the TLC NAND is the SMI SM2256. The controller adds in SLC caching but not SanDisk’s own nCache 2.0 which is why this feature isn’t mentioned.

Performance is pretty standard with all 3 variants reaching 535 MB/s reads but only the 480GB variant reach 445 MB/s writes as the 240GB drops down to 440 MB/s and the 120GB model down to 410 MB/s. Random reads hover about 37K IOPS while writes fall between 68K to 54K IOPS. It’s interesting that the Z410 reports lower numbers compared to the Crucial BX200 and Adata SP550, both of whom use TLC with the same controller. Given that SMI allows custom firmware, we may never know why the drives are different. No word on pricing has been revealed but expect it to fall near the Z400s.