Intel SSD 520 Series Solid State Drive Review
PCMark 7 Storage Benchmarks
We really like PCMark 7's Secondary Storage benchmark module for its pseudo real-world application measurement approach to testing. PCMark 7 offers a trace-based measurement of system response times under various scripted workloads of traditional client / desktop system operation. From simple application start-up performance, to data streaming from a drive in a game engine, and video editing with Windows Movie Maker, we feel more comfortable that these tests reasonably illustrate the performance profile of SSDs in an end-user / consumer PC usage model, more so than a purely synthetic transfer test.
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The Intel SSD 520 Series drive performance slightly better than the OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS, which was the other SandForce-based drive in the mix here. Overall, performance was among the best in the group in every test. Running a pair of Intel SSD 520 drives in a RAID 0 configuration, however, did little for performance according to PCMark 7, save for the application loading test which saw a significant boost in performance.
