Intel series 520 240GB SSD review - Introduction

The SSD arena is shaping up to be fierce with a lot of players. Take Intel for example, they now have multiple SSDs on the market initially with their proprietary controller, then a Marvel controller, and today Intel releases the Series 520 SSDs based on SandForce, well LSI these days.

With a continuously changing market the dominance of SandForce based SSDs however seems to decrease. OCZ for example just released a product with their proprietary Indilinx controller and a handful of companies started selling products based on that Marvell controller. And that's an interesting dynamic to witness in the technology channel alright.

To keep it up to snuff Intel now launches the series 520 SSDs, which comes with yep ... a 2281 series SandForce controller. According to Intel that will increase sequential read and write performance to 520MB/s, which makes the Series 520 the fastest SSDs they have ever produced. However, we stated it already, the market is fierce and competitive, the 2281 controllers have been widely adopted by many players like OCZ's  Vertex and Agility 3 series, or Corsair's Force 3 series and so on really. Giving them a huge head start.

With 4K random write performance estimated at 80,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) the product is definitely in the right performance bracket we like to see Intel in. As is the case with most other SSDs, the performance of the Series 520 drives varies a little according to their capacity, we'll explain that on the next page though.

Have a peek, after which we'll dive into the technology behind it and obviously we'll present you a nice phat performance overview.