Intel 520 Series 240GB Solid State Drive Review

Today we are looking at the latest Solid State Drive from Intel - the 520 series, codenamed 'Cherryville'. The drive is built around 'compute quality' 25 nanometer NAND flash memory and offers a claimed maximum sequential read speed of 550 MB/s. The Solid State Drive market has been extremely competitive in the last 12 months, with a plethora of SandForce driven units claiming the performance sector. It hasn't all been smooth sailing for Sandforce however, with concerns raised by enthusiast users in regards to reliability. OCZ and Corsair have even had to recall some drives in the past, due to Sandforce controller issues. This has opened the high end sector up for other manufacturers such as Crucial with Marvell controlled drives and Samsung with their own proprietary S4LJ204X01-Y040 controller. OCZ have even recently released the Indilinx Everest powered Octane solid state drive - just so the enthusiast audience have other options. It may therefore come as a bit of a surprise to hear that the Intel 520 series uses a Sandforce 2281 controller. Intel are releasing the 520 Series in a variety of sizes - 60GB, 120GB, 180GB, 240GB and 480GB capacity drives will be available. Today we are looking are the 240GB model, which offers read speeds up to 550MB/s and write speeds up to 520MB/s. All the drives offer the same read speed, but the write speeds fluctuate a little. The 60GB unit offers a maximum of 475 MB/s write and the 120GB is limited to 500 MB/s. Intel have been involved in the creation of these drives, and they all offer a co-defined and validated firmware release for an 'Intel-unique implementation'. The drives are rated with a life expectancy of 1.2 million hours and have an full Intel warranty for 5 years. HIGHLIGHTS Intel SSD 520 speeds performance for the most demanding applications and intense multitasking, to dramatically improve user experience. Intel SSD 520 gives users more capacity choices to drive increased SSD adoption across all corporate client/consumer computing platforms. Highly reliable, the Intel SSD 520 6gbps SATA III SSD is backed by extensive Intel validation and comes with a 5-year warranty. Security features include: Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256 bit encryption capabilities and stronger password protection for added security in the event of theft or power loss. “End to End Data Protection” ensuring integrity of stored data from the computer to the SSD and back. 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.' On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Intel have created notes for testing on Sandybridge Extreme platforms: 'For optimal performance when testing with the Intel® Desktop Board DX79SI Extreme Series (code named Sandy Bridge Extreme) with the RSTe 3.0 driver, be sure to disable Windows write-cache buffer flushing. This is accomplished by going to the Device Manager and checking the box for “Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device” in the drive properties “Policies” tab. Alternatively, you could use the native Microsoft AHCI driver for performance testing. ' Main system: CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24 PSU: ADATA 1200W Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise Monitor: Dell U2410 Other Drives (used in Core i7 2600k system above): Mach Xtreme MX-DS Turbo 120GB Corsair Performance Pro 256GB Samsung 830 Series 512GB Patriot Pyro SE 240GB Patriot Wildfire 240GB MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD OCZ Agility 3 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB ADATA S511 240GB Intel 510 120GB Corsair F100 100GB OCZ Vertex 2 120GB Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB PCIe drives test system: OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD & OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Test System: CPU: Intel Core i7 990x @ 4.8ghz Cooler: Corsair H100 Performance Liquid Cooler Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Black Edition Memory: 12GB Kingston DDR3 @ 1600mhz 9-9-9-24 PSU: ADATA 1200W Graphics: Nvidia GTX580 Chassis: Lian Li X2000F Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise Monitor: Dell U2410 Software: Atto Disk Benchmark CrystalMark AS SSD PCMark 7 IOMeter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.1 x64. Incompressible data performance is excellent, although we would expect write performance to increase noticeably when we change to '0x00' mode. Sequential read performance is excellent, averaging 483 MB/s. The Intel 'tuned' firmware performs well with this benchmark. As we do with all our SSD reviews, we enable ‘compressible’ data mode, called ’0×00′. The performance gains are as we would expect with a Sandforce controller, with sequential write performance increasing from 303 MB/s to 486 MB/s. Above, some compares with other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed in the last couple of months. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Performance in ATTO is class leading, right up there with the Patriot Wildfire 240GB and the ADATA S511 240GB. Above, some comparison results from other leading drives currently available on the market today. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. AS SSD only works with incompressible data which highlights the strengths of this particular drive, with an excellent overall score of 760. This drive is right up there with the class leading Patriot WildFire 240GB SSD. A hell of an achievement. Above, some comparison results from other leading drives available on the market today. PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use. The Intel 520 Series 240gb SSD delivers some of the best results we have achieved in PCMark 7, for a total of 5336 points. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. We use a custom Kitguru configuration for 4k random write and 4k random read, to measure performance. IOPS performance with this particular drive is excellent, and as good as we have seen. Intel rate the drive as 'up to' 60,000 IOPS for 4k random writes, and up to 50,000 IOPS for 4k random reads. We aren't sure how they configured their own test parameters, but our results are very close indeed, scoring slightly less in the 4k random read test, but more in the 4k random write test with 46,066 and 63,412 respectively. 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. One of the fastest drives we have tested to date, slotting in at 22 seconds. Again, class leading results, falling in at the top of the chart, with 17 seconds. Equal to the Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS. The Intel 520 Series 240GB is one of the fastest solid state drives on the market, right at the very top of our group test beside the Patriot Wildfire 240GB and Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS. There is no doubt that Intel's custom validated firmware has been finely tuned to offer class leading IOPS performance with both random read and write tests. The Intel 520 Series drive excels when dealing with both compressible and incompressible data, meaning it can be used for a wide variety of tasks, including professional level rendering and data intensive multi tasking environments. While there is a profusion of competing products and concerns have been raised about Sandforce reliability I would have no hesitation buying one of these drives for my own system. Intel are standing firmly behind this drive with a full 5 year warranty for complete peace of mind. We know for a fact that Intel have a first class warranty system, so if you have been unsure recently about the Sandforce platform, then this could very well make a fantastic first time purchase. My favourite performance oriented solid state drive has been the Patriot Wildfire 240GB, but this Intel 520 Series 240GB is just as impressive, with slightly better IOPS performance. 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 imcompressible data.