Intel 730 Jackson Ridge 240GB SSD RAID 0 Review

KitGuru reviewed the Intel 730 Jackson Ridge Solid State Drive back on March 6th, and there was a lot of interest in the review. Since then Intel sent us over two more 730 drives and today we supplement our original findings by adding some RAID 0 results. As we covered in the earlier review the new 2.5 inch Solid State Drives use a specially qualified 3rd generation Intel controller, the same 20nm NAND flash memory that was used in the S3500, alongside an optimised firmware. Intel have overclocked the controller by 50% and the NAND bus has been tweaked by 20%. Intel have released the 730 in 240GB and 480GB capacities and there is quite a difference in rated write performance between the two units. Sustained Sequential Reads / Writes 240GB: up to 550 / 270 MB/s 480GB: up to 550 / 470 MB/s Today we put two of the 240GB drives into a RAID 0 configuration and see how the performance scales. The 240GB is significantly slower than the 480GB version when looking at sequential write performance - down from 470 MB/s to 270 MB/s. Read speed is the same, rated at 550 MB/s. 730 SSD 4K IOPS performance is rated at 86,000 read and 56,000 write for the 240GB model and 89,000 read and 74,000 write for the 480GB model. Again the 240GB unit suffers a noticeable performance penalty. The new 730 Solid State Drive is based on the Intel PC29AS21CA0 controller which is found inside the Intel DC S3500 and S3700 products. Both of these drives are designed with the server market in mind, delivering consistent write performance. The higher cost S3700 has been designed specifically to deal with extremely taxing write based workloads. It is able to deliver 10 full drive writes every day, for five years. The 730 is based on these drives, but as a consumer model it is using 20nm ONFI flash memory. The controller has been overclocked from the 400mhz speeds in the server models, to a final clock speed of 600mhz. NAND bus speeds have also been increased from 83mhz to 100mhz. The 730 is also protected with an impressive five year warranty – covering 70GB of data transfer each day across the time frame. If you are moving a lot of data around every day and demand the highest levels of reliability, then this is a very strong selling point. No retail packaging with our sample, just a simple brown box with a ‘speed demon’ sticker, and the drive enclosed in an anti static wrap. The Intel 730 240GB Solid State Drive ships in an attractive little enclosure – with details listed on the underside. The full retail model of this drive is covered with a ‘skull sticker’ shown on the first page of our review today. Four screws hold the two sections of the chassis in place. There are thermal/protective pads on both sides. The pictures above show two 105c rated 47 μF rated capacitors (along the bottom of the images), which are utilised for power loss protection. Above this are two 512MB DDR3 1600 DRAM chips. The rear of the PCB has eight NAND packages and the Intel PC29AS21CA0 controller, which as previously discussed, runs at 600mhz. The other side of the PCB would be populated if this was the 480GB model. 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. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later. 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. Main system: Kitguru Test Rig 2 Compare system: CPU: Intel Core i7 2700k 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 Other Drives OCZ Vertex 460 240GB Samsung 840 EVO 1TB OCZ Vector 150 240GB ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128GB Visiontek Racer Series 120GB Kingston HyperX 3k 120GB OCZ Vertex 4 512GB OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSD Review (firmware 1.4 update) Transcend SSD720 128GB Kingston SSDNow V+200 90GB OCZ Octane 512GB (V1.13 fw) 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 Software: Atto Disk Benchmark CrystalMark AS SSD PCMark 8 IOMeter 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. 4K QD32 performance is superb, right at the top of our chart below the RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB. The controller deals with compressible data at the same level as incompressible data. These are ideal results for a very wide audience. Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed in the last year. 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. We mentioned earlier in the review that the write performance of the 240GB drive is less than the 480GB unit, around 270 MB/s compared against 470 MB/s. In Raid 0 we can see the impact this has, because while the read performance of two drives is 1045MB/s, the write performance is around 570 MB/s - not far ahead of the peak speeds achieved by single high performance Sandforce 2281 powered drives. Some comparison results from other leading products 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 deals exclusively with incompressible data and this is when the Intel 730 drive really shines. The final score of 1651 is the highest score we have ever achieved from a single drive, or two drives in RAID 0. As a balanced, all round drive the Intel 730 rates extremely highly. Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months. 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 test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. In Raid 0 the IOPS performance increases substantially, increasing to 102,041 IOPS in the 4k random read test and 97,253 in the 4k random write test. Intel’s official IOPS performance for a single drive is rated at 86,000 read and 56,000 write, so our results are actually better than Intel’s official claims. We initially reviewed the Intel 730 'Jackson Ridge' Solid State Drive early in March and noted that it was a very capable drive when dealing with a variety of intensive tasks. Our views since then haven't changed at all and we find Raid 0 performance is very strong indeed. The 730 drive is proof that Intel are certainly capable of creating competitive Solid State controllers in 2014. The overclocked state of both controller and NAND flash memory ensure that data throughput is consistent under stressful, long term situations. Competitors have quoted 20GB of writes per day and we know from our review of the Vector 150 drive a short while ago that OCZ raised the game to 50GB a day. The Intel 730 is now the leading drive rated at up to 70GB of data a day, complete with 5 year warranty. This will prove beneficial for high definition video editors and the professional workstation userbase who need a reliable drive to render 3D scenes. A wide audience will also appreciate that the drive uses 47 μF rated capacitors to ensure data gets transferred from the cache to flash memory during a power failure. In this situation critical data will get written to the 730 Solid State Drive when other drives would end up empty handed. As we mentioned in our last review, the 730 240GB has a rather noticeable weakness ... the write performance. The 480GB drive is rated at 470 MB/s sequential write but the 240GB drives are rated to only 270 MB/s. By today's standards this is noticeably behind the performance curve. This is reflected in the RAID 0 performance results today, ATTO for instance recorded a 1045 MB/s read result but around 570 MB/s in the write test. If write performance is critical to your working environment then we do recommend you spend the extra money and get the larger 480GB 730 drive. Overclockers UK have the 240GB unit available for at £179.99 inc vat, and the 480GB unit at £349.99 inc vat. If long term reliability and incompressible data performance is important then the 240GB has a lot to offer. Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE. Pros: 5 year warranty with 70GB of data rated per day. incompressible and compressible performance is very strong. IOPS performance. Intel drives have proven to be very reliable since they launched. built in capacitors act as a data safety measure. Cons: A little more expensive than some leading competitor drives at same capacity. 240GB drive takes a 200 MB/s write hit compared to the 480GB drive (400MB in Raid 0). Kitguru says: An excellent drive from Intel and one geared for long term reliability with balanced all round performance. If you move a lot of data around every day, this should be right at the top of your shortlist.