SanDisk Extreme 500 240GB USB 3.0 Portable SSD Review

TweakTown's Rating: 87%

The Bottom Line

SanDisk's Extreme 500 carries solid value in a crowded market and adds to it with a high performance bus powered solution that fits in your pocket.

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Portable SSDs are unique in that, for the most part, they offer a higher tier of performance than your standard USB 3.0 flash drive. While these solutions have recently been favoring the Thunderbolt 2 interface for extreme performance, SanDisk has chosen to use USB 3.0 for their latest mainstream portable solution.

The Extreme 500 is a next generation portable SSD solution that SanDisk touts as half the size of your smartphone with four times the performance of a hard drive. This drive features a unique diamond shape with capacity options including 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB. As mentioned above, the interface of choice for this drive is USB 3.0 and that allows marketing performance to reach 415 MB/s read and 340 MB/s write. Compatibility of the SanDisk Extreme 500 includes Windows Vista, 7, 8 and Ten along with OS X 10.4+.

MSRP of the 240GB SanDisk Extreme 500 comes in at $129.99 with a three-year warranty.

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Packaging for the Extreme 500 includes an image of the drive with capacity listed at the top right.

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The back of the packaging details marketing information on the drive and the encryption software included on the drive.

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Getting to the scope of delivery, we have a USB 3.0 cable and the drive itself.

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A closer look at the drive shows the textured plastic housing that is surrounded by a rubber bumper adding to the durability.

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The front edge or nose of the drive moves away to reveal the USB 3.0 port.

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The SanDisk Extreme 500 is factory formatted with the exFAT file system, ensuring compatibility between Windows and Macintosh computers. The usable capacity after formatting is 223GB.

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Above, we have our run with the Extreme 500 in Anvils. As you can see, we were able to reach 384 MB/s with 4MB sequential read while random read hovered around 4700 IOPS. Write performance came in at 327 MB/s and 9700 IOPS.

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Adding the Extreme 500 to our chart, we find it's not quite the quickest drive we have tested but does do quite well.

Over the years, I have seen a good amount of Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 SSDs. While no single solution sticks out in my mind, the SanDisk Extreme 500 is one that will certainly go on my list of favorites. This solution carries a robust build quality with a combination of plastics and rubber to add durability while being an SSD solution gives this solution no moving parts.

Performance, while not the quickest we have tested, was more than respectable with peak numbers reaching 384 MB/s read and 327 MB/s write. Random performance was quite good too at 4700 IOPS read and 9800 IOPS write. In our chart, the SanDisk Extreme 500 landed in the top five of all drives tested and adding to this SanDisk includes encryption software on the drive to secure your data.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by this lightweight, pocket-sized drive from SanDisk. It offers a substantial amount of performance with several capacity options for every budget and is backed by a leader in the flash market.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Z97-A - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Cooler: Corsair H100i GTX - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Memory: Patriot Viper 3 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 1600 - Buy from Amazon
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Storage: Intel 730 480GB - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Case: Corsair Obsidian 750D - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Power Supply: Thermaltake Toughpower 750W - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 - Buy from Amazon