Compare and contrast
All in all, it appears the Intel 510 is a drive that costs more and benchmarks as somewhat slower than its almost identical counterpart, with minor exceptions. While the Intel drive does achieve 20K/12K IOPS, the M4 is easily capable of 40K/30K IOPS and is rated at 40K/50K.
Quick, but not as quick as Intel suggests
Verdict
Despite this, Intel’s 510 series is a serious performer and could likely be capable of more under the right conditions. So, if you’re a die-hard Intel fan still clinging to your X-25M but wishing it was more, then you’ll probably spring for this one.
For those of you who aren’t so loyal, you may want to be considering Crucial’s offering due to the lower pricing and larger variety of capacity options. Either way, you’ll be getting one of the best performing SSDs on the current market. ®
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Intel 510 250GB Sata 3 SSD
COMMENTS
Not that important, really
Wear leveling has been made a big issue of, because people are worried about early drive death, but it's just not a complex or expensive process. SSDs remap every page (4 or 8k) from the OS LBA to flash blocks, so they're free to save your data wherever they'd like, and ensuring that blocks are written evenly is simple (compared to other background processes likely to run on an SSD.)
I've used and benchmarked plenty of SSDs, and blocks have failed plenty of times (According to SMART stats) and I've never noticed. That's because blocks have a limited write lifetime, and when a write fails, the drive can just silently re-write the data to another block, and your OS never knows the difference, except for maybe a slightly higher latency. Drives come with varying amounts of spare blocks for re-allocation and to retain a pool of clean blocks for writing, so this block death doesn't become a problem for a while.
The main issues to worry about on an SSD is what the firmware does to maintain a pool of erased blocks, and how they protect themselves against a power failure. If you've got no erased blocks available, then each write has to wait for a block to be recycled, which takes ~50x longer than a simple write to a fresh block. As the drive fills, this is what causes the performance drop that most people worry about. TRIM can help, but the drive still has to be intelligent about how it organizes the data on flash.
Since the SSD blocks are re-mapped, the drive has to store that table somewhere. Since it's expensive to write blocks to flash (Especially blocks that don't get re-mapped, IE necessarily the ones that store the mapping table) they generally store this table in DRAM and only commit it to flash periodically. That means when you lose power (A proper full shutdown is safe,) your drive has a fair chance of losing a few of your last writes, depending on the firmware. I'd personally not consider using a drive without power fail protection (Intel SSD 320, anything with a SandForce 15xx or 25xx controller - Look for pictures of a drive taken apart, banks of SMD capacitors are easy to spot.)
Unanswered questions about wear leveling
More important than the relatively small speed differences among SSDs is the quality of the wear leveling. It seems likely to me that this varies greatly, and that the variation could be sufficient to be relevant. I don't see an easy and optimal technique, so there must be various methods, with various properties. At these prices, I'd like to know more.
Why 80% ?
If your tests show the Intel is slower and more expensive than the opposition then how does it rate 80%?
I'm not complaining, I just don't understand.
