Seagate 600 240GB SATA III 6Gbps SSD Review

Legit Storage Reviews

Seagate has long been a player in the storage industry, best known for its hard drive products and more recently, its hybrid HDD/SSD drives. As such, it may be surprising that it's taken so long for them to jump into the pure SSD consumer market as so many other already have. At this point, we are seeing drive makers reduce in number as component prices and sales margins fall, somewhat of an echo of sorts of how the spinning platter drive market evolved. Nevertheless, Seagate has chosen to power their latest 600 series drives with the Link_A_Media Devices (LAMD) LM87800 controller (now owned by SK Hynix) and pair it with Toshiba NAND - a configuration we've seen before with good results.

The 600 series is actually available in two configurations - one with a z-height of the familiar 7mm and another with a rarely seen 5mm (part numbers end 1). Both are available in capacities of 120GB, 240GB and 480GB. There is also a pro model with similar capacities plus higher overprovisioned capacities of 100GB, 200GB and 400GB. They are essentially the same drives as the non-pro but offers a few extras such as greater endurance and on-board capacitors as an extra measure to prevent data loss should power be suddenly interrupted. Here's a quick little overview video produced by Seagate:

The drives have admirable performance specifications of 550MB/s reads and 450MB/s writes and IOPS performance of 80,000/70,000 reads/writes respectively. All carry a three year warranty and Seagate's track record of quality.

Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits Read:Annualized Failure Rate (AFR):Endurance (Total Bytes Written (TBW)):

Our test sample arrived bare in nondescript packaging so we have no images of that but the drive comes as is with no other frills such as adapter plates, cables, stickers or software. Although not relevant to performance, the exterior of the drive is quite attractive with the black textured surface and a white wave accent flowing down the left side. Definitely different than any other drive on the market. How about the inside? Let's see...

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SanDisk Extreme II Series 120GB, 240GB and 480GB SSD Review

Legit Storage Reviews

It was June of last year when we had a look at the first edition of the SanDisk Extreme SSDs which was powered by what was at the time, the hottest SSD controller on the planet - the SandForce SF-2281. Times have definitely changed and while the SF-2281 controller is still very much a popular controller, there are a number compelling options available now. With that, SanDisk has decided to change things up a bit with their high performance Extreme II drives and go with the latest Marvell 88SS9187 controller which we first saw on the Crucial M500 review. It puts out some really nice numbers and in fact SanDisk has even stated that the Extreme II drives are the fastest retail drives they've outed to date.

We were fortunate enough to get our hands on all three available capacities SanDisk is offering 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB. All of them see an overall performance increase over the first generation Extreme drives with the increases most pronounced on data that's incompressible which we'll see in our benchmarks. They are all also covered with a robust 5-year warranty which equals the best on the market that we could find and have a MTBF of 2,000,000 hours.

Marvell 88SS9187 SSD processorSATA 6 Gb/s compliant: Backwards compliant to SATA 3 Gb/s & SATA 1.5 Gb/sATA Command Set ACS-2NCQ support up to queue depth = 32Support for TRIMS.M.A.R.T. feature supportedAdvanced Flash Management:nCache™ – Non Volatile Write CacheDynamic and Static Wear-levelingBad Block ManagementBackground Garbage CollectionAdvanced features:Tiered caching – Volatile and non-volatile cacheSupports multi stream – improves user experience in multitasking systemsMinimal write amplification – increases endurance and performanceSupport for Thermal throttling:Performance will be throttled in the event junction temperature of critical components is measured to be exceeding the maximum allowable for the product

The notebook bundle comes with a spacer shim for more fitment options in a variety of equipment, changing the drive height from 7mm to 9.5mm.

The desktop bundle comes with a SATA 6Gbps data cable and a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter plate as well as the necessary screws for affixing to the plate. We'll have a look inside each drive now.

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