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

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

Our original review of the Intel 520 Series 240GB earlier this week concluded that this drive should be right at the top of your shortlist when contemplating the purchase of a new, high capacity solid state drive.

Our view on this hasn't suddenly changed today and RAID 0 results indicate very good performance scaling, peaking at around 1GB/s with both sequential read and write tests.

It is true that the Sandforce 2281 controller isn't quite as potent when dealing with incompressible data, however the Intel modified firmware and choice of high quality memory ensure that the 520 series 240GB drive leads the SandForce pack, right up there with the flagship OCZ drives. In regards to concerns regarding SandForce reliability in the last year, the full Intel 5 year warranty should be extremely reassuring.

If you want ultimate performance, then two of these drives configured in RAID 0 make for a very tempting proposition!

The Intel 520 Series 240GB drive costs £399.95 from ARIA in the UK. At this price we feel it offers great value for money with the fastest performance on the market today.

Just remember, if funds are tight the 120GB version or 60GB version will make less of a dent on your wallet.

Aria have a full range of Solid State Drives, available here.

Pros:

Class leading performance.
5 year warranty.
good with both compressible and incompressible data.

Cons:

not quite as fast as the latest Samsung drives when reading incompressible data.

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Rating: 9.0.

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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.