Intel 730 SSD review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 4 of 17 Published by

teaser

Product showcase

Product showcase

The following images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon DSLR shooting 12 MegaPixel photos.

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Right then, above, the product. Interesting, in the USA they have a skull-head logo stamped on the product. Here in the EU, not so much. The sample Intel submitted comes as a 480 GB package. Performance is listed at 550MB/s read and 470 MB/s writes with ~80K IOPS at 4k random write aligned disk access with our tested model. The higher capacity drives are often a notch faster btw.

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And there it is, this is the 2.5" SATA III version all packaged up in the bundle. You should easily be able to place it somewhere in your chassis. Small and light-weight. The SSD supports TRIM making sure your SSD will regain its speed once in idle. Obviously you do need to connect it to a proper SATA 3 (6G) controller though, the best ones can be found on the Intel series 6, 7 and 8 chipset based products. We also found that the new AMD FM2 based chipsets like the 85X perform really good as well. 

 

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When we look at the connectors, we spot the standard power and Serial ATA connectors. This drive is SATA3 (6G). Obviously the drivers are backwards compatible towards SATA2 as well, but the bandwidth limitation there would be capped to roughly 270 MB/sec (which still is silly fast compared to HDDs). A proper SATA 6G cable is recommended and should be delivered with your motherboard. We however never ever had issues with a standard SATA2 cable either. It seems that SATA3 cables are a little thicker, that's all. Yes, we received an engineering sample, tagged as Jackson Ridge, for those that recognise it, that would be fairly similar to Intel's DC S3500 SSD (for data-centers).
 

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