XSReviews

Sandisk is one of the best known names when it comes to flash memory, and their latest drive is the Z410. This drive is intended for enterprise use, as a cost-effective upgrade from older SSDs or mechanical drives. Thanks to Zoostorm and Sandisk, we’re able to put it to the test!

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Pros Way faster than a mechanical HD Good sequential read/write performance Reasonable value of £0.25/GB

Cons Poor random read/write performance

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Summary and Score

The Z410 is a low-cost SSD with good sequential speeds, both reading and writing, but worse random performance than high-end consumer drives. If you’re looking for a cheap upgrade to an old SSD or (gasp) a mechanical drive, this is a good shout if you can find it for a low price.

See SanDisk Z410 SSD on Amazon

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Specifications & Design

• Capacity: 240GB
• Sequential Read Speed: up to 535MB/s
• Sequential Write Speed: up to 440MB/s
• Random Read Speed: up to 36K IOPS
• Random Write Speed: up to 54K IOPS
• Form Factor: 2.5-inch cased
• Warranty: 3 years

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Benchmarks

We’ll be testing the Z410 against the Samsung 850 Evo and 840 Evo, plus the Corsair Neutron GTX from 2012. These are top of the line enthusiast-focused drives, so it’ll be a tough test for this enterprise-focused, low-cost Sandisk drive.

We’ll be testing the drive in our new test rig, which has a Core i5 6600K processor, 16GB of Crucial DDR4 RAM and runs Windows 10.

Thanks to NZXT for providing the Manta case and Kraken X61 liquid cooler. Thanks to Samsung for providing the Evo 850 M.2 boot drive. Thanks to Zoostorm and Crucial for providing the DDR4 RAM.

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CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark has been one of my favourite benchmarks for evaluating storage speeds for a while now, thanks to its varied incompressible workload and extremely readable results. Here’s the 3.0.3 x64 version of the benchmark; all results are in MB/s.

CDM 3 Read	Seq	512K	4K	4K QD32
Sandisk Z410	508	357	13	146
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	502	447	45	368
Samsung 850 Evo	513	472	38	408
Samsung 840 Evo	515	473	35	397
Corsair Neutron GTX	450	376	27	328

CDM 3 Write	Seq	512K	4K	4K QD32
Sandisk Z410	407	355	97	250
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	474	394	113	316
Samsung 850 Evo	504	479	68	352
Samsung 840 Evo	500	390	86	313
Corsair Neutron GTX	480	468	69	158

The Z410 shows reasonable sequential performance, but relatively worse results as block size is decreased. Speeds when reading or writing 4K blocks are particularly poor. This underlines the importance at looking at the full benchmark — it’d be tempting to look at sequential results only and dub this a very fast drive, but it’s not the whole picture.

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AS SSD Benchmark

AS SSD is another benchmarking tool quite similar to CrystalDiskMark, which uses predominantly incompressible data across a range of workloads including sequential tests, random performance and access times. First three numbers are MB/s and access time is in ms.

AS SSD Read	Seq	4K	4K QD64	Acc. Time	Score
Sandisk Z410	501	11	145	0.045	206
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	493	40	328	0.093	417
Samsung 850 Evo	516	34	382	0.059	467
Samsung 840 Evo	513	32	330	0.059	413
Corsair Neutron GTX	507	25	334	0.068	N/A

AS SSD Write	Seq	4K	4K QD64	Acc. Time	Score
Sandisk Z410	407	78	215	0.237	333
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	475	95	251	0.075	393
Samsung 850 Evo	497	66	299	0.051	415
Samsung 840 Evo	497	69	207	0.054	326
Corsair Neutron GTX	473	62	295	0.062	N/A

Once again, the Z410 displays reasonable read and write speeds in sequential tests, but performance while reading small 4K blocks, a task that commonly occurs on booting a system and in some games (depending on how they’re designed), is atrocious. The access times measured are also interesting, being very very good in reading, and very very bad when writing.

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ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO produces rather less comprehensible results than CrystalDiskMark, but still provides a good test of compressible data transfer. It also provides a lot of data points; I’ve selected six from across the range. Settings were the default: 256MB total length and queue depth of 4, testing from 1KB to 8MB. All results are in MB/s.

Atto Read	1KB	4KB	64KB	256KB	1MB	8MB
Sandisk Z410	78	247	518	531	536	533
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	83	286	537	553	552	553
Samsung 850 Evo	80	269	538	551	558	558
Samsung 840 Evo	94	280	535	551	555	555
Corsair Neutron GTX	15	61	336	452	530	540

Atto Write	1KB	4KB	64KB	256KB	1MB	8MB
Sandisk Z410	69	184	419	423	426	428
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	79	251	510	526	525	525
Samsung 850 Evo	83	255	519	529	534	534
Samsung 840 Evo	81	260	515	527	533	534
Corsair Neutron GTX	15	142	474	470	493	498

Trends continue in the ATTO benchmark, with the drive showing decent performance at high block sizes, and worse performance at lower sizes. The drive is purportedly designed for enterprise use, so it’s likely that sequential speeds were prioritised over random access.

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HD Tune Pro

We conclude with HD Tune Pro, a benchmark which produces three scores for average read speed, read access time, and burst read rate.

HD Tune Pro 5.50 Read	Average	Access Time	Burst Rate
Sandisk Z410	358 MB/s	0.035 ms	140 MB/s
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	321 MB/s	0.087 ms	221 MB/s
Samsung 850 Evo	370 MB/s	0.044 ms	250 MB/s
Samsung 840 Evo	358 MB/s	0.041 ms	231 MB/s
Corsair Neutron GTX	340 MB/s	0.059 ms	231 MB/s

The average speed here is quite strong, with a maximum around 425 MB/s, and access times are also excellent. Burst rate is around 60% the speed of every other drive we’ve tested, but still well above the average mechanical drives the Z410 is designed to replace.

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Wrap-up

The Z410 doesn’t compare to high-end consumer SSDs from Corsair, Samsung and others, but that’s OK! This is a low-end SSD, which still manages to provide a noticeable speed boost over older SSDs and all mechanical hard drives.

See SanDisk Z410 SSD on Amazon