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It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.
Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.
The sequential read speed of the Intel 510 120gb drive means that it can outperform the Vertex 2 and Corsair F100 by a couple of seconds. When compared against the mechanical drive, the differences are really noticeable!
STALKER is a game which takes some time to load. With the benchmark figure of 36 seconds recorded for the mechanical drive, we can see the SSD's reducing the time taken, considerably. The Intel 510 120gb drive again leads the pack cutting the time taken by 15 seconds.
Read about this elsewhere and was disappointed then, even more so now. Not what we expected from intel. they should be making their own controllers.
Yeah, pretty much what I thought. Marvell controller was great with crucial used it a long time ago and the tuning has helped with read performance. Its just too little to late imo from intel. the timing is all against them
Looks good for a boot drive, which I would think a lot of people want/need.
Shame about the I.O performance on small files, it was always a weakness of the marvell controller. I feel a bit annoyed Intel didnt make their own drive, like they did before. it feels more like a ‘placeholder’ drive until their next one. I hope so anyway.
The 250GB drive is much better, but its 450 quid. You can get an OCZ revo drive for that. I know which I would take.
Im glad you did the real world tests, I was about to give up on this. but it seems very good for a boot drive. tempted tbh, as I know Intel have the best warranty system on the planet.
Please don’t just post the score of AS SSD as most of it comes out of one part of the bench (4k QD64). The score is really bad for comparing SSDs.
Otherwise great review.