KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
The Intel 510 Solid State drive arrives in a colourful, artistically designed box with the name and size on the front.
Inside, the drive is protected within an anti static bag, and is wedged between a cardboard tray.
Intel supply a 3.5 drive bay, mounting screws, software for migrating data, as well as a sata cable and power converter.
The Intel 510 120GB is encased in a rather plain looking enclosure with the details of the specifications on the front.
Inside, the 120GB 510 drive is built around a green PCB which is controlled by a Marvel 88SS9174-BKK2 chip. This is a newer revision of the same controller which we have seen before in Crucial's C300 drive. Intel however have fine tuned the firmware to concentrate more on sequential performance. This is why the performance figures are higher than other Marvell controlled drives we have reviewed in the past.
The Marvel controller is tied into a 128MB DDR3 cache by Hynix. This is a high volume of cache, and around four times as much as on the X25-M. TRIM support is also offered on this drive which will be reassuring to many people. This drive uses 34nm memory produced by IM Flash Technologies (Intel/Micron).
There are 16 8GB memory chips on the PCB, eight on the front and eight on the rear, giving a total capacity of 128GB. When the drive is formatted there is approximately 111GB free to use.
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.