Intel 520 240GB SSD
Sandforce inside
Review The rumour mill was working overtime throughout 2011 with suggestions that Intel was considering forsaking the Marvell controllers it had used for its previous generation of consumer SSDs, the 510 series. The story went that the company was jumping into bed with another third party controller manufacturer, namely Sandforce, for the next generation of its solid state drives.
Taking control: Intel's 520 SSD
Certainly, those who thought that the idea was nonsense have been left with egg on their faces. Intel's 520 series – code named Cherryville – has duly arrived and this new family of SSDs is, indeed, being looked after by Sandforce controllers.
Intel may be very late to the table with a Sandforce-based drive – some 18 months, in fact – but just like Kingston and its Hyper X series, Intel has a reputation for quality control and validation to uphold. And while Sandforce controllers have a lot going for them, they're not immune to bugs. So after exhaustive analysis – Intel claim over 5,000 individual tests – checks and tweaks, the drives are finally here, albeit quite a while after everybody else’s.
The Sandforce controller takes a hefty bite out of the drive's capacity
The 520 range consists of drives with 60, 120, 180, 240 and 480GB capacities which is a far better spread than the previous 510 series from a consumer’s point of view which just offered drives in 256GB and 512GB capacity. The 480GB drive only comes in a 9.5mm high offering while all the other drives are 7mm high and come with a 2.5mm plastic adaptor that allows them to fit into 9.5mm drive bays.
Although 16 x 16GB memory chips populate the 240GB Intel 520, one is used for firmware and other tasks
All 520 drives have quoted sustained sequential reads of 550MB/s with sustained writes ranging from 475MB/s (60GB), 500MB/s (120GB) up to 520MB/s for the 180, 240 and 480GB versions. On test is the 240GB 520 (SSDSC2CW2240A3K5) which Intel claims has a 4KB random read/write performance of up to 50,000IOPS and 80,000IOPS respectively.
Next page: Fresh thinking
COMMENTS
"Hence, the 240GB capacity, which, when the drive is formatted, drops even further to 224GB"
Actually the capacity doesn't drop when formatted, rather you change from using the hard disk drive manufacturer's standard decimal-based measurement of 1 GB = 10 to the power 9 bytes, to using the more widely used (at least, by filesystems) binary-based measurement of 1GB as 1024 to the power 3.
I rather think you're mistaken. The original idiom was "all told", although the "all tolled" version is used, if much less frequently.
http://www.word-detective.com/2008/04/11/all-told/
Power consumption
I imagine most people are most interested in SSDs for their speed. The next most interesting number to me is power consumption. It's a shame that it doesn't feature much in these reviews.
My laptop runs continuously, mostly used as a desktop replacement rather than being lugged around. I was keen to replace the HDD with a SSD to increase reliability and lower power consumption, until I discovered that most SSD seem to have about the same power consumption as the equivalent HDD. That was disappointing. Would be nice if power consumption were included in the summary box.
Re: Just have to say
Unless you are referring to a peal of bells, "all told" is the correct form.
