Intel 510 250GB Sata 3 SSD

Benchmark tests

Picking these drives apart on technical merits, the CrystalDiskMark results while certainly high performance, don’t show the Intel SSD 510 coming out on top. With the exception of the 33MB/s lead in the 1GB sequential read, the 510 lags behind the Crucial M4. When it comes to tests using a 32 bit queue-depth with 4KB random operations, the M4 leaves the 510 in the dust delivering read/write throughputs of 168 and 141MB/s respectively, against Intel's 81 and 50MB/s performance.

CrystalDiskMark 3 Results

Data transfer speeds in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Longer bars are better

In the hope that I might see Intel’s claimed performance with another benchmark, I ran AS SSD but nothing I observed was even close to the claimed 500MB/s reads or 315MB/s writes. All is not lost though. Intel does indeed deliver on IOPS. 19,514 is near enough the 20K read IOPS and when it comes to writing, the 510 blasted past the expected 8K all the way up to and beyond 12K IOPS.

ATTO test results

In the interests of completeness, I put the 510 through its paces with ATTO Disk Benchmark, which did manage to produce some rather impressive read speeds of 400MB/s. Writes remained the same at around 210MB/s though.