Best performance backed by longest warranty

The SandDisk Extreme Pro has the best performance among standard solid-state drives (SSDs) on the market. And if that’s not enticing enough, it’s also the first that includes a 10-year warranty.

If you’ve been holding up on getting an SSD for your computer, this is the drive you’ve been waiting for. Even if you’ve already been using another SSD for a few years, the new Extreme Pro will also make a considerable upgrade, totally worth the suggested friendly pricing of $189 (AU$279), $369 (AU$499), and $599 (AU$799) for 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB, respectively. As with all SSDs, the street price is expected to get even lower later this year.

If your computer doesn’t support SATA 3 (6Gbps), or if you just want something more affordable, check out this list of top SSDs on the market for alternatives.

Familiar standard design

The new Extreme Pro looks very similar to previous generations, namely the Extreme II and the Extreme. It’s a standard 2.5-inch internal drive that’s 7mm thick and supports SATA 3 (6Gbps) interface. The drive works in any application where a standard SATA hard drive is being used. Note that most new computers supports SATA 3.

Out of the box, the drive comes with a piece of spacer that add another 2.5mm to its thickness. This allows it to fit in snugly in a drive bay designed for a standard laptop hard drive, which is 9.5mm thick. Windows users can also download the SanDisk Dashboard software that offers real-time diagnostics, firmware update and other support information.

Overall, just by looking, the Extreme Pro is very similar to most SSDs on the market. On the inside, however, it’s quite new.

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SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD specs

New nCache Pro Technology

Sharing the same Marvell 88SS9187 controller with the Extreme II, the Extreme Pro, however, uses SanDisk’s homegrown second-generation 64Gbit 19nm MLC NAND flash memory as its storage. On top of that, the drive is the first that features nCache Pro Technology, which is designed to optimize read and write speeds and drive endurance. The technology also offers better protection for the data stored on the drive.

SanDisk says the technology also promises to deliver consistent performance even when multitasking, with low latency, over a long period of time, and with low energy consumption. In my testing, the performance proved this to be the case.

High endurance, consistent performance

Like all SSDs, the Extreme Pro has a limited program/erase cycles (known as endurance), meaning you an only write so much data to it before the drive becomes unreliable. ( Read more about SSD endurance here.) However, the Extreme Pro has an extremely high endurance of more than 80TB. In other words, if you write 20GB to the drive per day every day, it’d take more than 11 years for the drive to run out of P/E cycles. Most of us write much less than 20GB per day to our computer’s internal drive per day and definitely not everyday.