Nobody panic. Intel is still coming out with its much-delayed third-generation solid-state drive. The 320 Series will use 25nm NAND and Intel’s latest controller, on 3Gb/s SATA, and will focus on what made Intel drives great: high read speeds and random writes, and rock-solid reliability. Intel, recognizing that 250MB/s read speeds ain’t gonna cut it in 2011 (and holy cow, do we love typing that), is also bowing to popular demand and releasing an SSD with 6Gb/s SATA capability, but rather than design its own controller for that, Intel is using a third-party component. Intel wouldn’t officially tell us which controller, but thanks to the mysterious and powerful technol-ogy known as screwdriver, we can say with confidence that it’s Marvell’s 88SS9174-BKK2.
Intel’s 510 SSD isn’t part of the same family as its X25-M drives, but it’s special in its own way.
Intel’s 510 Series SSD uses 34nm Intel NAND chips and 128MB DDR3 DRAM cache—and, of course, the same 6Gb/s Marvell 9174 controller as the Crucial and Plextor drives. The 250GB model that we tested showed the strongest sustained-write speeds of any drive in our roundup—more than 300MB/s—and its sustained reads of more than 480MB/s bested every Marvell-based drive. But its 4KB random-read and -write speeds, at any queue depth, were good by 2009’s standards, but no match for Crucial’s offering or either of the last- or current-gen Vertex drives.
If you go solely by sequential-read and -write speeds, the Intel 510 is one of the fastest drives we’ve ever tested, but its random-read and -write performance lags far behind the front-runners. By splitting its SSD line into two segments (3Gb/s SATA, random-write-centric versus 6Gb/s, sequential-speed-centric), Intel risks having two less-than-compelling options. And in a crowded field, consumers might not go with either one, especially given the jaw-dropping $614 street price of the 250GB 510 Series SSD.
$614, www.intel.com
Fast sequential reads and writes; vaunted Intel longevity.
Expensive; noncompetitive 4KB random reads/writes.
| Intel 510 | |
|---|---|
| Capacity | 250GB |
| Controller | Marvell 9174 |
| CrystalDiskMark | |
| Sustained Read (MB/s) | 480.1 |
| Sustained Write (MB/s) | 328.9 |
| 4KB Read, 32QD (MB/s) | 80.02 |
| 4KB Write, 32QD (MB/s) | 49.7 |
| AS SSD | |
| Seq. Read (MB/s) | 483.6 |
| Seq. Write (MB/s) | 308.03 |
| 4KB Read (IOPS) | 4,674 |
| 4KB Write (IOPS) | 9,923 |
| Read Access (ms) | 0.207 |
| Write Access (ms) | 0.095 |
| ATTO | |
| 64KB File Read (MB/s) | 449.2 |
| 64KB File Write (MB/s) | 341.5 |
| IOMETER | |
| 4KB Random Write | 12,123.95 |
| Max Access Time (ms) | 318 |
| Premiere Pro Encode Write (sec) | 424 |
| PCMark Vantage x64 HDD | 39,053 |
Our current test bed is a 3.1GHz Core i3-2100 processor on an Asus P8 P67 Pro (B3 chipset) running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. All tests used onboard 6Gb/s SATA ports with latest Intel drivers, except 3Gb/s SATA tests, which used onboard 3Gb/s Intel SATA ports.
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