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The Ultra Plus comes in a small, red and white box. While there aren't a lot of details on the back, the front advertises the drive's 256GB capacity as well as the performance benefits it has to offer. Inside the box, you'll find the Ultra Plus, a 2mm spacer for notebook installations and an installation guide.
Physical Features:
The Ultra Plus looks very similar to SanDisk's other 2.5" SSDs. The top of the outer casing is made out of black plastic with a large, gray and red sticker showing that the SSD is part of the company's Ultra Plus series. The bottom of the casing is made out of metal and is painted black to match the top. The large sticker on the bottom covers the screws holding the drive together and shows information like the part number, capacity and serial number.
Upon opening the case, I was a bit surprised to see how small the Ultra Plus' PCB was. Instead of using a regular size PCB, SanDisk has placed a half-slim SATA SSD inside of a 2.5" case.
As I mentioned earlier, the Ultra Plus uses Marvell's 88SS9175 controller chip. The 88SS9175 is very similar to the 88SS9174 "Van Gogh" controller found in the Corsair Performance Pro, Intel SSD 510 and Plextor's M2 and M3 series SSDs. However, instead of eight channels, the 88SS9175 has only four.
For the Ultra Plus, SanDisk opted to use their own 64GB 19nm eX2 ABL MLC NAND flash chips. Looking at the picture above, you can see that there are two of these chips on either side of the PCB. The drive also has a 128MB Samsung DDR2 DRAM memory chip that is used for caching.
