Intel 520 Series 240GB (Raid 0 update) 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.

When configured in RAID 0, the overall time drops from 22 seconds to 18 seconds, slotting in 2 seconds behind the RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB.

The single drive manages to hold its own against the Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS drive, measuring 17 seconds. When configured in RAID 0, the time drops to 14 seconds, only a second behind the RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB drive.

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