Intel SSD 510 Series 120GB Review

The OCZ Vertex 3 240GB blew us away when we reviewed it earlier this month. Its lighting fast transfer speeds and application performance left no room for the competition to breathe -- including the once-praised Samsung 470 Series and Crucial RealSSD C300 drives. The Vertex 3 proved to be dramatically faster than its predecessor, and perhaps just as important, that speed comes at nearly the same cost.

Having surpassed some of the best SSDs we've tested, we were left to wonder if the Vertex 3 would remain unattested in the short-term. With Crucial's M4 shaping up to be a mainstream drive, who else could rise to the challenge? We may have an answer to that question today as we test the closest thing the Vertex 3 has to competition: Intel's new flagship SSD 510 Series.

Considering all the achievements Intel earned with its X25-M drives, hardware enthusiasts were to expect Intel to oppose OCZ's juggernaut. The company has recently launched three new SSD lines: the 310, 320 and 510 Series.

The SSD 310 Series is intended for notebooks or other small form-factor devices and comes in 40/80GB flavors that use 34nm MLC NAND flash memory. They feature the same controller used by Intel's X25-M G2 (the Intel PC29AS21BA0) and offer read/write speeds of 200/70 MB/s over SATA 3Gb/s.

The SSD 320 Series is the first to pack Intel's new 25nm MLC NAND flash chips, but it also uses the PC29AS21BA0 controller, inherently limiting the drives to SATA 3Gb/s. The 310 and 320 drives should be competitive in terms of pricing and reliability, but they're not meant to break performance records.

That's precisely where the SSD 510 Series steps in, though to be honest the drive isn't exactly what we expected. For starters, it uses older 34nm MLC NAND flash, which is more expensive than 25nm memory. Even more shocking, Intel has abandoned its in-house controllers for a foreign solution.

The SSD 510 Series is driven by the Marvell 88SS9174-BKK2, and that makes it far less unique than Intel's previous drives when you consider that Crucial and Corsair use the same controller. It's believed that Intel settled for the Marvell because of timing, as they simply didn't have anything ready to compete at the top of the chain.

Nonetheless, Intel will handle its own firmware, so its drives are likely to perform differently to those by other manufacturers. With the addition of SATA 6Gb/s, the 250GB SSD 510 Series supposedly hits top reads of 500MB/s, while the 120GB that we are reviewing today is a tad slower at 450MB/s. Let's see how these figures check out…

The SSD 510 comes in 120GB ($270) and 250GB ($590) capacities, both of which drop Intel's traditional 7mm design that uses a shim to reach the 9.5mm thickness of a standard 2.5" drive. The drives casing now measures 3.92 x 2.74 x 0.37" (99.8 x 69.63 x 9.5mm) and weighs 0.18lbs (81.6 grams).

The 120GB version boasts read and write speeds of 450MB/s and 210MB/s, while the larger 250GB version is considerably faster at 500MB/s reads and 315MB/s writes. Naturally, the SATA 6Gb/s interface is essential to achieving these staggering read speeds, but this presents a minor issue: Intel's new Sandy Bridge platform is the only one to provide native SATA 6Gb/s support -- and it does so with only two ports.

Third party embedded solutions such as the Marvell 88SE9128 can provide motherboards with SATA 6Gb/s support, but have very poor performance compared to Intel's implementation. That said, there is a new Marvell 88SE9182 controller that can match the performance of Intel's 6 series chipsets, so it's fair to say that support for the 6Gb/s SATA interface is improving.

The 510 Series consumes a mere 380 milliwatts of power when in use and 100 milliwatts in standby, which is considerably lower than drives such as the OCZ Vertex 3.

As mentioned earlier, the SSD 510 comes loaded with 34nm MLC NAND flash memory. Our review sample has sixteen 8GB Intel/Micron 29F16B08JAMDD ICs for a total capacity of 128GB.

Once formatted in Windows, the original 128GB drops to 111GiB, meaning you lose roughly 13% from the GB to GiB conversion along with the spare area. With an MSRP of $270, the SSD 510 120GB costs $2.25 per gigabyte, which is average by SSD standards.

Intel has given the SSD 510 a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) rating of 1.2 million hours. Although this is lower than the 1.5 million hours that most manufacturers rate their SSDs at, Intel has an impeccable track record for reliability and the SSD 510 series goes through the same validation and testing as previous SSDs.

Furthermore, Intel's three-year warranty should let customers sleep comfortably at night knowing they're covered for a reasonable timeframe.

The Intel SSD 510 Series 120GB, OCZ Vertex 3 and Crucial RealSSD C300 were tested using SATA 6Gb/s, requiring us to use the Sandy Bridge (LGA1155) platform. All other 3Gb/s drives were tested on our older LGA1366 platform, but this shouldn't affect the results. A few select SATA 3Gb/s drives were tested on our newer LGA1155 test system to check for testing accuracy, both synthetic and real-world performance were much the same.

In addition to our featured flash devices, the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM hard drive has been included for comparison's sake. Other SSDs used for comparison feature controllers such as the SandForce SF-1200, JMicron JMF616, Intel PC29AS218A, Marvell 88SS9174, Toshiba TC58NCF618GBT and Samsung S3C29MAX01. Our testing suite consists of four synthetic benchmark programs and our own file copying and load time tests.

As you should know by now, while manufacturers claim impressive peak I/O performance out of the box, this performance can diminish over time. Unlike a conventional hard drive, any write operation made to an SSD is a two-step process: a data block must be erased and then written to. Obviously if the drive is new and unused there will be nothing to erase and therefore the first step can be bypassed, but this only happens once unless the drive is trimmed.

Considering this, we'll test how much performance you can expect to lose from each SSD over time. We'll test all drives in their clean unused state, and then run the HD Tach full benchmark several times which fills the entire drive. This simulates heavy usage and gives us a clear indication of how performance will be affected in normal long-term use.

All drives in this roundup support the Windows 7 TRIM function, which is meant to counteract these negative effects.

SATA 6Gb/s System Specs
- Intel Core i7-2600K (LGA1155)
- x2 4GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill (CAS 8-8-8-20)
- Asus P8P67 Deluxe (Intel P67)
- OCZ ZX Series (1250w)
- Intel SSD 510 Series 120GB
- Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB
- OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
- Asus GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)

Software
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
- Nvidia Forceware 270.51

SATA 3Gb/s System Specs
- Intel Core i7-965 EE (LGA1366)
- x3 2GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill (CAS 8-8-8-20)
- Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58)
- OCZ ZX Series (1250w)
- Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB
- Kingston SSDNow V+ 100 256GB
- Kingston SSDNow V 100 256GB
- OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB
- OCZ Vertex 2 Pro 100GB
- OCZ Vertex 120GB
- Intel SSD 320 Series 300GB
- Samsung 470 Series 256GB
- Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB
- Asus GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)

Software
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
- Nvidia Forceware 270.51