SanDisk Extreme 900 480GB Portable USB Type-C SSD Review

With USB 3.1 and Type-C starting to become a bit more common, it is about time we start to see devices really take advantage of it. Today, we are taking a look at the SanDisk Extreme 900, a 480GB portable SSD using the USB Type-C connector, can this drive really offer 9x the performance of a traditional external HDD? Let's find out. The SanDisk Extreme 900 offers up easy to use encryption along with a durable aluminum and rubber design in order to protect the drive and your data. Features and Specifications: 480GB capacity. Encryption software. Up to 9x faster than an external HDD. USB 3.1 Type-C. Compatible with OSX and Windows. The SanDisk Extreme 900 480GB ships in a sensibly sized box with a picture of the drive on the front and compatibility information on the side. The back of the box lists key features - such as speeds up to 9x faster than a traditional external HDD and durable aluminum housing. On the top side of the drive, you will find the SanDisk logo, there is also a little LED that will turn on when the drive is active. On the underside of the SSD, you can see the capacity. The drive itself looks quite nice. The aluminum and rubber housing give it a somewhat premium aesthetic and the build quality feels solid enough to withstand some shock and protect your data in the event of an accident. Not many motherboards are USB 3.1 Type-C equipped yet, so while the connection on the drive is Type-C, there is a Type-A to Type-C cable included in the box so compatibility shouldn't be an issue. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings with your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Here is the list of benchmarks used in this test: Atto Disk Benchmark. CrystalMark 3.0.3. AS SSD. IOMeter. The system used for these tests included an Asus Maximus VIII Impact Z170 motherboard, which uses 10Gbps USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C ports provided by Intel’s formerly-Alpine Ridge DSL6540 controller, which provides more bandwidth compared to AsMedia's alternative. CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. For this test, we are using V5.1.1. The overall performance here is strong with speeds that would rival many internal SSDs. We ran the test multiple times and the results remained consistent throughout, which is a good sign of performance reliability. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customise your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Our ATTO results are also impressive, with read and write speeds peaking over 700 MB/s. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. AS SSD uses incompressible data so these results allow us to see how SanDisk's controller performs in this environment setting. Read speeds can fluctuate a bit from test to test but write speeds generally remain consistent throughout. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. As you can see, the SanDisk Extreme 900 480GB was able to deliver some consistent read and write speeds during this test. The SanDisk Extreme 900 is the first external Type-C SSD that we have tested and overall, it is a great performer. Not only does it offer plenty of storage with its 480GB capacity but its performance also puts it on par with many internal solid state drives. We observed strong results across all of our tests with excellent read/write speeds in ATTO and CrystalDiskMark and strong uncompressed data performance in AS SSD. It is clear that USB 3.1 has allowed SanDisk to achieve much higher speeds for a portable drive and thanks to the inclusion of a USB Type-A to Type-C cable, the drive is backwards compatible with motherboards that don't feature a USB Type-C port, as well as USB 3.0 and 2.0 though using a lower-spec port will hurt performance. The SanDisk Extreme 900 Portable SSD is available in three capacities, 480GB, 1TB and 2TB. The drive we tested today was the base model, which comes in at £226.99 on Amazon UK. It's a lot of money for a portable drive but does deliver on the performance side. Specifically, the SanDisk Extreme 900 peaked at 749MB/sec in ATTO, which is more than 75% faster than any external SSD we've tested before. Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE. Pros: Strong performance results. USB 3.1 allows for very fast speeds. Aluminium housing. Cons: Expensive. KitGuru Says: SanDisk has delivered an excellent drive here. It is expensive but it really delivers on performance.