Intel SSD 545s Series Solid State Drive Review: One Of The Best SATA SSDs Available
Performance Summary: The Intel SSD 545s was an excellent performer in our series of benchmark runs. It didn’t lead the pack in every synthetic benchmark, but it was the fastest SATA-based SSD we’ve tested in the trace-based PCMark tests and it similarly led the pack in the HD Tune benchmarks as well. In the rest of the tests, the drive offered solid performance that was competitive virtually across the board – winning some tests and trailing slightly in others. Access times and sequential transfers were particularly strong, however.
SATA-based solid state drives may not be as exciting as bleeding-edge PCIe NVMe-based offerings that boast multi-gigabyte per second transfers, but they remain one of the most effective upgrades available for the multitude of systems that might be currently hobbling along with much-slower hard disk drives, and that can’t accommodate M.2 or slot-based SSDs. We’ve been bumping into the limitations of the SATA interface for some time now, but with its new 64-layer TLC 3D NAND, SMI controller, and Intel optimized firmware, the SSD 545s still manages to incrementally improve overall performance versus older drives. The 512GB Intel SSD 545s featured here is available for $179.99, or roughly $0.35 per gigabyte, which is competitive with other drives in this class. Pricing for the higher (and lower) capacity drives will likely be similar in terms of cost per gigabyte, when they ship in the not too distant future.Couple the Intel SSD 545s series’ strong performance, with Intel’s well-known reliability in the storage space, competitive pricing, and a 5 year warranty, and we’ve got an easy recommendation on our hands.
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