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

1. Introduction2. Intel 520 Series 240GB SSD3. Intel 520 Series 240GB SSD (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. CrystalDiskMark6. ATTO Disk Benchmark7. AS SSD8. PCMark 79. IOMeter10. Real World Testing11. Closing Thoughts12. View All Pages

A few days ago we looked 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. It claimed our top award earlier this week, thanks to the class leading performance and reassuring 5 year warranty.

In the launch review we mentioned some reliability concerns with the latest Sandforce drives … several companies had to recall some of the drives due to controller problems.

Intel are offering a full 5 year warranty with these drives, so if you have been a little unsure about buying a Sandforce 2281 powered drive, then we feel this is a good time to take the plunge. Intel have a class leading return policy and have stood by it in the past.

So why the follow up today? Well I was genuinely that impressed with the custom Intel firmware 240GB 520 Series drive, that Intel sent another so we could update our readers with RAID 0 results. An enthusiast user with £800 burning a hole in their pocket will assuredly be contemplating a pair of these 240GB drives for blistering system performance.

Intel have released the 520 Series in a variety of sizes – 60GB, 120GB, 180GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities are available. Today we are looking at the 240GB drives, which each offer 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. The drives are rated with a life expectancy of 1.2 million hours.

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.

If you have read our previous article then you may want to skip straight to the performance testing later in the review.

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 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 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.

Almost 900 MB/s sequential read when configured in RAID 0. This is without enabling compressible data either which will increase the scores significantly.

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 read performance increasing to 956.7 MB/s read and 938.5 MB/s write.

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 great, and we record around 1 GB/s with both read and write tests. This slots the Intel Series 520 RAID 0 configuration in right behind the OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB.

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. In RAID 0, this score increases to 1413 which is a noticeable 86% increase.

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 total score of 5,621 points is hard to analyse as PCMark 7 uses complex algorithms to calculate the final score. It isn't a simple case of ‘double score for RAID 0'.

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 from this drive is very impressive. RAID 0 scores increase significantly, to 108,008 for 4k write, and 82,556 for 4k read. Obviously there are many ways to run this test and other parameters may raise or lower the scores a little. For our particular configuration these are very strong results however.

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.

Our original review of the Intel 520 Series 240GB earlier this week concluded that this drive should be right at the top of your shortlist when contemplating the purchase of a new, high capacity solid state drive.

Our view on this hasn't suddenly changed today and RAID 0 results indicate very good performance scaling, peaking at around 1GB/s with both sequential read and write tests.

It is true that the Sandforce 2281 controller isn't quite as potent when dealing with incompressible data, however the Intel modified firmware and choice of high quality memory ensure that the 520 series 240GB drive leads the SandForce pack, right up there with the flagship OCZ drives. In regards to concerns regarding SandForce reliability in the last year, the full Intel 5 year warranty should be extremely reassuring.

If you want ultimate performance, then two of these drives configured in RAID 0 make for a very tempting proposition!

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 incompressible data.

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