Intel SSD 520 Series Solid State Drive Review

Name: Intel SSD 520 Series
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, February 06, 2012, 09:00 AM EDT

Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built-into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark being developed by Alex Intelligent Software. This test is interesting because it uses a mix of compressible and incompressible data and outputs both Read and Write throughput of the drive. We only graphed a small fraction of the data (1% compressible, 50% compressible, and 100% compressible), but the trend is representative of the benchmark’s complete results.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark

Bring Your Translator: http://bit.ly/aRx11n

Read performance was similar for all of the drives in the AS-SSD compression benchmark. Write performance, however, differs quite a bit. The OCZ Octane, Crucial, and Samsung drives show flat write performance, which is to say performance doesn't differ much with incompressible or highly compressible data. The SandForce-based drives take a performance hit when writing incompressible data. Note that the Intel drive was somewhat faster than the OCZ Vertex 3 across the board.

Tags: Intel, SSD, Storage, SATA, Enterprise, SandForce, LSI, 520 Series

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com