Intel SSD 525 Review: Five mSATA Drives, From 30 To 240 GB

[compton]

Intel has a new family of mSATA-based SSDs powered by SandForce's second-gen controller. Dubbed the SSD 525, we have all five capacities in our lab. Can the promise of strong performance, 5,000 P/E cycles, and a five-year warranty make up for high prices?

Intel SSD 525 Review: Five mSATA Drives, From 30 To 240 GB : Read more

 

[hero1]

Nice article. I would like to see more motherboard makers finding a way to include the mSATA slots right on the board like Gigabyte does. I think the ability to have your OS and programs on mSATA and leave the other SSD for games and storage is very welcome. This will be my next hunt, too bad I got rid of my UD5H because it had mSATA slot. I would like to see such feature in the X99/X89 platform.

 

[abbadon_34]

Interesting, if it wasn't a single brand.

 

[slomo4sho]

The 250 GB Samsung 840 still seems to be the best buy when evaluating price per performance as it is frequently offered at around $.60 or less per GB.

 

[abbadon_34]

damn site changes, no edit.

Interesting, if some benches weren't Intel only, but all included the relavent competitors.

 

[sanilmahambre]

Impressive! but don't think i am wealthy enough to buy those

 

[damianrobertjones]

It is REALLY unfair to reduce the performance of smaller GB drives!

 

[dthx]

[citation][nom]damianrobertjones[/nom]It is REALLY unfair to reduce the performance of smaller GB drives![/citation]
This is not something manufacturers do to just to p*ss off users who buy the smaller capacities.
A small drive has fewer memory chips than a large drive. The controller has then fewer chips to efficiently spread the data to... and this leads to decreased performances. There's nothing immoral to that.
It's not the same story like for example, a couple of years ago, Yamaha selling a 2x CD writer and a 4x CD writer at double the price ... and by removing one resistance, your 2x writer became a 4x model ;-)

 

[mapesdhs]

[citation][nom]slomo4sho[/nom]The 250 GB Samsung 840 still seems to be the best buy when
evaluating price per performance as it is frequently offered at around $.60 or less per GB.[/citation]

It's a surprisingly good drive, and performs very well on boards that only have SATA2.
I recently upgraded my brother's P55 system with an 840 250GB; the main game he
plays atm now loads in just a few seconds, instead of the more than 3 minutes it took
with the old mechanical disk (and that wasn't exactly a low-end drive either - a WD VR
150GB 10K SATA). He is, as one might expect, very happy indeed.

In addition, I bought him an internal Startech storage unit that holds 4 x 2.5" devices
(it takes up one 5.25" bay) and a couple of 2.5" drives (1TB for general data, 2nd-hand
250GB for backup of the 840). He bought another 1TB for backup, so the Startech now
holds the 840, two 1TB and the 250GB. The end results looks rather good, and the
performance with the 840 is excellent (I bought one for my 3930K setup).

I have a lot of OCZ drives (more than 40, various models); what impresses me the most
about the 840 is the way it maintains top performance even after being hammered with
an 80GB full clone from an old disk, lots of Windows and driver updates, game installs, etc.
Testing with HDTach, AS-SSD, etc. show performance almost identical to an original clean
state. None of my OCZ drives behave this way - the HDTach graph shows significant
variance, while the 840 graph is smooth across the range. Beats me how Samsung has
achieved this, but I like it.

Modern SSDs may be saturating the SATA3 interface, but they bring an amazing new lease
of life to older SATA2 systems.

Ian.

 

[ddpruitt]

The vast majority of mSATA systems use the SSD as a cache, and then it's only Intel systems. I would like to see the mSATA ports be more flexible and offered on a larger variety of systems. I'd love to upgrade the mSATA on my laptop but there's no point, I already use an SSD for the main drive. Turning an mSATA into a usable drive on the system is a PITA and just not worth it.

 

[Onus]

I have an Asus Maximus Gene V which has a mSATA slot on a little riser card. I am using a 238GB-usable Crucial M4 there as my system drive. It's been working well, so I have no complaints.
I have an ASRock Z77E-ITX back from RMA that I haven't yet put back into service that has a mSATA slot on its underside. It can be used to build a very small system. That these slots are only 3Gb/s hardly matters when comparing them to the speed of a mechanical HDD.

 

[dalethepcman]

[citation][nom]ddpruitt[/nom]The vast majority of mSATA systems use the SSD as a cache, and then it's only Intel systems. I would like to see the mSATA ports be more flexible and offered on a larger variety of systems. I'd love to upgrade the mSATA on my laptop but there's no point, I already use an SSD for the main drive. Turning an mSATA into a usable drive on the system is a PITA and just not worth it.[/citation]

You are confusing msata with mini pcie. A drive is a drive is a drive, sata is sata is sata. Connect any msata drive to an actual msata port (not mini pcie which has the same connector) and it can become your C drive. No one is forcing you to use Intel SRT\RST to use an msata drive as cache.

If you purchased a 2.5" ssd and now feel your msata port is useless thats on you. If you had purchased an msata drive you could have used a 1tb in that 2.5" bay instead.

 

[Hanin33]

[citation][nom]dalethepcman[/nom]You are confusing msata with mini pcie. A drive is a drive is a drive, sata is sata is sata. Connect any msata drive to an actual msata port (not mini pcie which has the same connector) and it can become your C drive. No one is forcing you to use Intel SRT\RST to use an msata drive as cache. If you purchased a 2.5" ssd and now feel your msata port is useless thats on you. If you had purchased an msata drive you could have used a 1tb in that 2.5" bay instead.[/citation]

to add some clarification: the confusion stems from some laptops using a mPCI-Express as a multipurpose slot allowing either mPCI-Express or mSATA cards. while i have not seen this on desktop motherboards, maybe ddpruitt's experience comes from spotty documentation from laptop makers on whether their combo port supports mSATA? otherwise, you are very correct that the mSATA should appear to the system as any other SATA drive and be usable as such.

 

[K2N hater]

It's expensive if you compare it to slow SATA drives that fail even on light usage. I've replaced a RAID-0 array of 15K drives to a single SSD 520 240GB and I must tell destiny is unfair to the state of the art motors that rest silently in a wardrobe now.

 

[ipwn3r456]

This is a pretty great solutions for laptops that only have the space for 1 hard drives, and a mSATA slot. mSATA SSD for OS and applications, and the HDD for the laptop for storage. For desktops, this is perfect for cache solutions.