KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
There have been many people waiting on the new Intel 510 series solid state drives and we can't help but feel slightly disappointed with the overall package.
The 120GB unit is a sequential read powerhouse, capable of handling well in excess of 400 MB/s with a 6Gbps controller. In our testing it performed better than the competing products when used as a boot drive, or when loading games and applications. Unfortunately by using the Marvell controller, the write performance is a little lacking, and much slower than current class leading Sandforce drives. This is only the tip of the iceberg however, as there are new SF-2000 drives about to hit the market, which promise superior all round performance.
There is no doubting that this drive will work wonders under the right conditions, but it is entirely focused on sequential read bandwidth and lacks in other areas, such as random read and write performance. To be fair, we shouldn't really expect much more, after all, it is using 34nm NAND technology and a controller tuned for sequential read throughput.
If you need a solid state drive specifically for moving large files then this is a great choice, but it does struggle with processing small files, especially when compared directly to Sandforce based products.
Pros:
- SATA 6Gbps capability
- sequential read performance is class leading, for the time being anyway
- TRIM support
Cons:
- random performance is poor
- pricing could be better
- write performance is lower than the leading drives
- its released just as the next generation technology is due to hit.
KitGuru says: A solid release from Intel, but we had hoped for a little more.
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.