Sandisk X210 256GB Business Class Solid State Drive Review

Test Procedure

Test system:

• Asus Maximus V Formula
• Intel Core i7 3770k
• Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 16GB
• Corsair H100i
• Corsair HX1050W
• Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
• Asus VS247

We would like to thank AOC, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components.

Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible.

Software used:

• AS SSD – Compression Benchmark
• ATTO
• CrystalDiskMark
• Anvil’s Storage Utilities RC6
• IOMeter

After attending a couple of meetings regarding the launch of the X210, Sandisk made a bold point in stating that users will not see the drives full potential as far as IOPs are concerned from the point of install. Instead the IOPs performance will grow over time as the drive becomes more conditioned and as the total amount of data written to the drive over time increases. Consequently this has stirred our interest to see if Sandisk’s claims are indeed true, however typical day-to-day usage, even on an extreme level would take days if not weeks at least to perform and is therefore not practical to do.

In order to simulate a longer period of life on the X210, we will use the drive endurance test within Anvil’s storage utilities and with its ability to consistently perform full drive read, write and erase cycles over and over, 5TB worth of data can be written to the drive to fast forward the condition process that would otherwise take weeks or months to complete. Once the drive has been conditioned I will run all of the bench mark tests once again, focussing on the IOPs results to see if the drive really does get better over time.