Sandisk Ultra Plus 256gb

Anyone have anything to say about this drive? I've been looking for a while now to replace my drive with a larger one, but all the 6gbps drives except the Intel 320 have comparatively awful power consumption. This one is right in line with the X25-M and 320. Performance looks to be pretty decent, but I really it's not something I've concerned with anymore. With my browsing/Office/music usage there was no difference between the X25-M and 830. So anything to be concerned about the reliability of this drive? Marvell controller and Sandisk's own 19nm nand. Price is $170 from amazon.

 

IIRC, the Intel 320 is SATAII (3Gb/s), not SATAIII.

I haven't heard anything bad about Marvell's controllers (that's what is used on the Crucial M4, probably one of the most popular drives out there). As for the flash, I don't see anything on Google other than that it's being released and that it should be as reliable as the 25nm MLC chips.

 

The Intel 320 is reliable as hell, few drives will be able to match the over-engineering that went in to it. That being said, it has very weak sequential Write performance (about the same as a high end 7200RPM drive).
There isn't much difference because the 4k Random Read performance hasn't really improved with the jump from 3gbps to 6gbps. If anything, some of the 6gbps drives have reduced 4K performance in order to bulk up Sequential transfers. Its not until you get to the 2nd Gen 6gbps drives (i.e. the Samsung 840 pro, OCZ vector, Plextor M5P) that this metric started inching up, even then the difference is only subtly noticeable.
Marvell + Sandisk NAND is quite a solid combo, power consumption should be quite good considering its a 4 channel design compared to most of the 8 channel drives out there (more NAND per package). The only major weakness of the 4 channel design is the reduction in High queue depth performance (multitasking).

 

SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD Review (256GB)