Intel SSD 510-Series 250 GB Review: Adopting 6 Gb/s SATA

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]louno[/nom]I am a bit disapointed in this review... It would really be nice if people doing reviews of intel 510 would at least compare it to OTHER brands using the SAME controller, because as was specifically pointed out in this article, companies using the marvell controllers can really make a difference with their firmwares.Right now there are 2 drives with the Marvell 88SS9174-BKK2 controller :Intel 510 AND Corsair Performance 3 series. Benchmarks for the Corsair P3 are near impossible to find even though that drive came out WAY before the intel 510.Wouldnt it make sense to compare the 2 !?!?! I mean, you still use the Crucial RealSSD300 which is an "old" drive that use the previous version of the marvell controller 88SS9174 BJP2... I just dont understand why the corsair p3 doesnt appear nowhere in reviews/benchmark online, instead the older crucial c300 is ALWAYS there in all reviews... is there some sort of heavy bias against corsair ssd's ?Additionally, it would be REALLY nice when doing benchmarks to not ONLY use the 250 GB version, most people are interested in the 120GB range drives because that is the sweet spot in terms of price. To most people, 584$ is just too expensive for a 250GB drive ! This leaves us making a decision on which drive to buy based on the benchmark of the bigger drive which we know are faster than the smaller versions.Aside from that, thanks for the review, you still do a great job and we appreciate it, but im just really disapointed about the lack of Corsair P3 drives in all the reviews out there.[/citation]

Corsair didn't see fit to sample that drive--likely as a result of the Vertex 3 drives we've been previewing. I would have liked to include it as well, if it's any consolation

 

[Bigmac80]

You don't need a SSD! What i do is wake up in the morning turn on my computer and get a cup a coffee and by the time i come back my computer is finished booting up.

 

[jimmysmitty]

[citation][nom]nitrium[/nom]Sorry for not providing a proper link. Here it is:http://www.xtremesystems.org/forum [...] p?t=260956My beef with this whole synthetic benchmarking is that I think the vast majority of users are unaware that getting this SSD or that SSD will make absolutely no material difference. Why don't reviewers benchmark actual things people are interested in? e.g. booting Windows 7, loading Dragon Age Origins/COD Black Ops, archiving a folder, launching Thunderbird/Firefox/Photoshop, running a virus scan? Is it because there will be no material difference between any performance SSD manufactured in the last 3 years? The thread above also notes that aside from SYNTHETIC benchmarks, raiding SSDs makes absolutely no difference in anything you do in a typical day to day environment. Yes, absolutely enterprise class users might get something tangible out of these new drives, but I suspect they are not the core audience of Tom's Hardware.[/citation]

Its all the same. In everything hardware wise the synthetics are pointless for most users.

For enterprises though they mean a lot. But whats nice is that it shows us what a drive is fully capable of.

Still I am more interested in seeing a 600GB SSD from Intel (out next quarter). It will be nice to see the SSDs pushing larger drive sizes and hopefully push pricing down.

 

[Ten98]

Great review. Long live king Sandforce!

I suspect this drive is not intended to challenge the SSD market. It seems more like it's a convenient way to get rid of all the 32nm flash chips intel stockpiled for the X-25M.

Intel fanboys would like to think that the smart move would have been to go with Sandforce and go head-to-head with the likes of OCZ and Corsair, or even develop a new controller of their own as they did for the X25s. However, as the review points out Intel only entered the market to shake things up a little and provide a cheap SSD fast enough to run Windows on a core i7 without the hard drive bottlenecking the system.

Mission accomplished. Sandforce is here and we will have cheap & fast SSDs for years to come, so they can get back to what they do best, CPUs.

It's not all that surprising that Intel have opted for the inferior Marvell controller rather than Sandforce. Intel have always had a "special relationship" with Marvell, it's the only 3rd party manufacturer that they buy secondary RAID controllers from for their motherboards, for example.

 

[ProDigit10]

I have my serious doubts of the usefulness of such fast drives optimized for large file data tansfers. Up'till now it's been said that SSD's are generally good for fast IOPS, good as OS or program/game boot loading times.

If moving data at large speeds is important, perhaps HD manufacturers should build drives with more platters. Technically A harddrive with 4 or 5 platters should easily be able to bump out read/write speeds of over 600MB/s; for the same price as these SSD's only with much higher capacities (4-6TB)!

 

[ProDigit10]

Then again, I also have my serious doubts of the usefulness of 6TB drives for the normal person.

 

[WR2]

Very useful look at the new SSDs.
Thanks for putting the review together.

 

[Guest]

"If moving data at large speeds is important, perhaps HD manufacturers should build drives with more platters. Technically A harddrive with 4 or 5 platters should easily be able to bump out read/write speeds of over 600MB/s; for the same price as these SSD's only with much higher capacities (4-6TB)!"

This is wrong. HIgher density is what is needed not more platters. More platters is when you can't engineer anything better. MAybe you meant multi-head drive. By that logic my 4-platter WD should be getting 300+MB/s. It gets 80MB/s. My single platter Seagate gets 130MB/s. Total drivel.

 

[silverblue]

I don't see why manufacturers aren't going the multi-head route. It baffled me even more with CD-ROM drives as the only multi-laser drive I can think of was the Kenwood TrueX 72x which had seven laser beams and used an operational speed of approx. 10x... and this was back in 2000. Sure, 72x was a best-case scenario, however it was very promising technology that proved that you didn't necessarily need fast rotational speeds, especially considering you were more likely to shatter CDs that way.

7,200rpm drives are all well and good but it takes longer to initially read data from them when coming from idle than with a 5,400rpm drive due to the pause required to get the drive up to its full speed. I know very little about drive technology (obviously), however wouldn't having a slowly rotating drive with multiple heads solve both issues of spin-up time and read/write performance without necessarily screwing up seek time?

 

[shineon2010]

I want this!

 

[lradunovic77]

Don't buy SSD cause it is pile of shit technology. Lack of space + expensive and its performace will degrade over time that it will end up slower than 5400RPM HDD. And format wont help there. Only tool which will restore SSD drive to original state is HDDEraser but you will lose all data (Reinstall). Trimming does not work well either. I said put 4 fast 7200RPM HDD into Raid 5 and good to go.
It is funny that you have to move these files out of SSD, move this out of it, move this out of it so on. Well fuck that cause purpose is to have all that in SSD and be fast all the time. Why the fuck you need SSD when you are going to write/and read most of the shit from regular HDD.

Bottom line SSD -> not worth it.

 

[silverblue]

You don't sound amazingly objective about SSDs.

 

[lradunovic77]

It is true. Not worth it unless they revise technology where writing wont matter anymore.

 

[lradunovic77]

Server is actually only place where SSD would make sense. Once you install Server OS and Apps under it will be pretty much read only. Again Files, Database would be on HDD.

 

[tigershark]

For me, the one comparison that I wish was given some mention in all SSD reviews, is how this compares to PCIe SSD's. Just one paragraph per review would really add value for me, as I'm trying to decide which way to go. With SATA 6Gb available, and PCIe V3 just around the corner (I hope - I am waiting for the next Intel performance CPU before upgrading), I just wish I had a better sense of how the two different connection interfaces compare.

I think the choice to go with 34nm could well be about longevity, another issue I'm concerned about because I can't afford to upgrade every 2 years. My systems have to last a lot longer. I pay the price premium every 7 or 8 years and buy top of the line components, they I expect, and do get many years of trouble free computing. So thanks to Tom's for all the hard work.

 

[Wamphryi]

I bought an SSD after succumbing to temptation. Sadly because I was already using Second Gen Raptor's the actual gain in performance did not justify what I paid out. The one area I think that the SSD is a real bonus is in the laptop market. They would make a real difference there. My advice is if you want a good boost to your laptop then go for it. If you have fast HDD's in your desktop save the cash.

 

[Guest]

hehe, even I read this I will buy Intel, I have now X-25M 80GB and go for 510 series, because I trust this drive, which I can not say about Vertex, I read lot of dead Vertex.

 

[Deleted member 521762]

Hello,
your review was pretty good and on point, but I feel there were some very important parts missing. Sorry if my response is all over the place. After looking to buy an SSD and seeing the user reviews on Newegg, I could see that Intel products (as usual) have a very low failure rate (4%-8%). OCZ and others have their typical 1 of 6 (16%) to 1 of 4 (25%) failure rate. I remember from experience, that even the better OCZ products involve a lot of hassle and often still fail. Also, as far as testing work loads, try installing programs or OSs as a test. Only bad programming or database access involve heavy random access of very small files. SSDs may beat random access against HDDs, but they still must beat serial access of RAIDs. Smart programming will involve putting all of your inputs close together (spacial locality). Not that many files we access are are 4k, why do ridiculous tests? When you load your games, what 3D object files are that small? I actually work at Intel and I can tell you that all we look at is the future. We look at how problems we have right now will scale in the future. We want our products to not become outdated too early. We are very strict about maintaining quality and not having to teal with recalls or warranty crap or suits due to bad engineering. The company has learned a few lessons over the decades, which is good for all of us. BTW, I'm a CpE, but I only write software. I do not design/make HW at all.

 

[Deleted member 521762]

Oh and the speed of "serial reading of RAIDs" is kind of a hint for what I hope to see. To give your viewers an idea of the time equation, think of this. T = A*(seek time) + B*(read time per block of N bytes). On Windows, blocks are usually 4kb, which is small considering that we were using that block size 10 years ago, when 80 GB was standard. Now 2 TB is standard. I have personally seen higher than the rated speeds (what OCZ thought their SSD could do) with my old OCZ SSD by using 16k up to 64k yte blocks. We can all bare to wait a few seconds, so random access is usually not that important. When we have lots of data to transfer, we want the overall trip to be fast. Do you want Windows to load 1 sec faster or have the movies on your external drive copy in 5 min less? If you really want to see full speeds, try formatting the drives with 64kb blocks and then both Intel and OCZ will look better...or not. Of course, the down side to using larger blocks is you can waste more space when files are very small, but you have fewer operations and everything we do here at Intel is all about doing something in parallel.

 

[Deleted member 521762]

I forgot to mention that the 510 Intel SSDs have the lowest power usage of all companies. Put that in your laptop and forget about disk access power.