Intel 520 Series 240GB (Raid 0 update) SSD Review

Allan 'Zardon' Campbell February 9, 2012 Featured Announcement, SSD Drives

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.

When configured in RAID 0, the overall time drops from 22 seconds to 18 seconds, slotting in 2 seconds behind the RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB.

The single drive manages to hold its own against the Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS drive, measuring 17 seconds. When configured in RAID 0, the time drops to 14 seconds, only a second behind the RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB drive.

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12 comments

Booke
February 9, 2012 at 1:14 pm

Id be happy if I could afford one of these, never mind two. nice performance. im off to cry in a corner.
Jerome B
February 9, 2012 at 1:15 pm

Work well in RAID 0, but £800 was more than my last system cost. still we can dream, right?
max
February 9, 2012 at 6:38 pm

These are amazing SSD drives provided by intel.

Check it out on amazon!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006VCP9G6/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=emjay2d-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B006VCP9G6
tuney
February 16, 2012 at 11:17 am

You missed a huge performance gain by not installing an intel rst version.
rapid storage technology gives a boost to the low/mid size file transfer rates which really makes a windows based operating system fly.
always only use the rst version from the boards download page along w/ being on the latest bios.
one little glitch to know about; most times write back cache is disabled by default.
open rst/click volume icon/toggle write back cache on/off/on.
re-run the atto bench and look for the big performance gain.