Wrap Up: Trading Blows With the Best
Had we reviewed the Extreme Pro in early June when it was released, we would have named it the best high-performance SSD money could buy. It narrowly outclassed the PCI Express-based Plextor M6e in our file copy tests and provided strong application performance. It also crushed the synthetic tests, with the exception of the CrystalDiskMark random 512K read test where it struggled.
However, it's been almost two months since the Extreme Pro was first released and in that time things have changed – namely the arrival of Samsung's SSD 850 Pro, which is faster than the Extreme Pro in seemingly every way, but not by a huge margin.
The 480GB Extreme Pro matches the 512GB SSD 850 Pro when looking at cost per gigabyte, but with Samsung's drive up to 12% faster in our file copy tests it seems like the obvious choice. The SSD 850 Pro was also consistently faster in our synthetic benchmarks as well.
Both manufacturers offer industry leading 10-year warranties for these products and as far as we can tell, both should deliver first-class reliability.
SanDisk has done a great job with the Extreme Pro and it's unfortunate for them that they will have to play second best to Samsung's SSD 850 Pro. With both products so closely matched the choice between the two will naturally come down to price, which will vary depending on where you are located.
Our advice is to grab whichever model is the cheapest while favoring the 850 Pro if you want the best performance, or if the drives are matched in pricing.
score
Pros: The Extreme Pro is among the fastest SATA SSDs you can buy today, it's reasonably priced and it ships with a 10-year warranty.
Cons: It's outdone by the performance of Samsung's 850 Pro and we would've liked to have seen hardware encryption included.