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

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

The Intel 520 Series drive arrives in a very distinctive branded box with the name and capacity listed on the front.

The drive and accessories are protected inside a strong brown cardboard box. The bundle is extensive … Intel have included a sata cable, power cable, mounting screws, 3.5 inch tray, literature on the product and a ‘speed demon' sticker.

The drive is sealed inside a sealed, anti static bag. No shock with the appearance of the drive, as it follows the corporate Intel design we have seen many times before in the past.

Getting access to the PCB is straightforward, although we don't recommend you do this with your own drive in case of warranty invalidation. That is why we are here after all.

The Intel 520 Series has been codenamed ‘CherryVille' and as the images above show, there is branding in the corner marked ‘Cherryville' and ‘Silk Top'/ ‘Silk Bottom'. Silky bottoms with your SSD? Very kinky! Intel also have their logo right in the center of the PCB too.

Intel are using 25nm ‘compute quality' NAND flash memory (29F16B08CCHE2). This is Multi-Level cell memory.

The Sandforce-2281VB1-SDC controller. This drive uses ‘an LSI SandForce Flash Storage Processor with an Intel co-defined and validated firmware release for an Intel-unique implementation.'

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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.