SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD Review (256GB)

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL (BETA)

You may not see this for long (and its definitely not common) but you get a freebee simply for reading!  Over the last little while, we have been assisting with beta testing new benchmark software called Anvil Storage Utilities which is an absolutely amazing SSD benchmarking utility.  Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and utilize in our benchmark testing.

These Anvil results are as expected and do little more than provide confirmation with respect to other benchmark results seen.  Anvil does an excellent job of providing the most comprehensive result within a single benchmark, however, and even system and disk characteristics are displayed on the lower left and right side.

PCMARK VANTAGE X64 HDD SUITE

The SSD Review uses benchmark software called PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Suite to create testing scenarios that might be used in the typical user experience. There are eight tests in all and the tests performed record the speed of data movement in MB/s to which they are then given a numerical score after all of the tests are complete. The simulations are as follows:

• Windows Defender In Use
• Streaming Data from storage in games such as Alan Wake which allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action
• Importing digital photos into Windows Photo Gallery
• Starting the Vista Operating System
• Home Video editing with Movie Maker which can be very time consuming
• Media Center which can handle video recording, time shifting and streaming from Windows media center to an extender such as XBox
• Cataloging a music library
• Starting applications

SANDISK ULTRA PLUS SSD PCMARK VANTAGE SCORING

The SanDisk Ultra Plus reached a high Vantage score of 66749 with a top transfer speed of 403MB/s while testing in Media Center. Although this is not the highest score we have seen to date, these are promising results for the class of SSD we are looking at.

The following chart is based only on PCMark Vantage scoring and represents a cross of mid-level SSDs that are a comparative to the SanDisk Ultra Plus.