Intel 510 Series 120GB SSD Review

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.

The sequential read speed of the Intel 510 120gb drive means that it can outperform the Vertex 2 and Corsair F100 by a couple of seconds. When compared against the mechanical drive, the differences are really noticeable!

STALKER is a game which takes some time to load. With the benchmark figure of 36 seconds recorded for the mechanical drive, we can see the SSD's reducing the time taken, considerably. The Intel 510 120gb drive again leads the pack cutting the time taken by 15 seconds.

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