Intel SSD 520 Series Solid State Drive Review

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI mode was enabled. The SSDs were secure erased and left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

IOMeter I/O Subsystem Measurement Tool

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance for the average end user. That said, we do think IOMeter is a gauge for relative available throughput within a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you really can't with most other benchmark tools available currently.

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; our Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and IOMeter's default access pattern of 2K transfers, 67% reads (34% writes) and 100% random access.

The Intel SSD 520 series drive's performance was mixed in our IOMeter tests. Intel's latest drive performed well overall, but trailed the other SandForce-based offerings using IOMeter's default access pattern. In our custom workstation test which ups the block size and changes the mix of sequential and random access, however, Intel's drive is among the best performers.

Also note, that since we got our hands on a pair of Intel SSD 520 series drives, we've included RAID 0 scores throughout our benchmarks as well. Although not comparable to any of the other single-drive results, we thought some of you would like to see how two of these drives perform when running in a RAID.

SiSoft SANDRA 2011 Synthetic HDD Benchmarking

Next we ran SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run without formatting and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.

Our SiSoft SANDRA tests show the Intel SSD 520 series drive performing as well as the other SandForce-based drives. In terms of read speeds, the Intel drive finished right alongside the OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS drive, but the SSD 520 pulled ever so slightly ahead in the write test. RAID 0 performance was exceptional.