Introduction

SanDisk is a famous storage brand that has for many years been a leader in flash storage products, like SSDs and media cards. They were acquired by Western Digital in 2016 for $19 billion and have since had their products integrated into the Western Digital lineup.



The SanDisk Ultra 3D 4 TB SSD has been on the market since August 2019. Why am I reviewing such an old SSD now, you're asking? The answer is simple: I'm working on a huge GPU benchmark with 50+ games and needed a big storage drive for all those games. The 4 TB version of the SanDisk Ultra 3D is one of the most affordable 4 TB 2.5" SATA SSDs on the market, so I just bought one. Especially sustained write performance is important for me, and that's a performance metric covered in nearly no reviews, so I thought "let's make a review of this, I sure won't be the only one looking for that piece of information."

Internally, the SanDisk Ultra 3D uses a Marvell 88SS1074 controller paired with 3D TLC from SanDisk. The drive comes with DRAM cache, too. 1 GB of DRAM is installed to provide fast storage for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The SanDisk Ultra 3D is available in capacities of 250 GB ($50), 500 GB ($73), 1 TB ($95), 2 TB ($200), and 4 TB ($400). Endurance for these models is set to 100 TBW, 200 TBW, 400 TBW, 500 TBW, and 600 TBW respectively. SanDisk includes a five-year warranty with the Ultra 3D SSD.