Intel series 520 240GB SSD review

HD Tune Pro 4.5

HD Tune Pro is a hard disk utility and benchmarking utility for Windows. This tiny application allows you to scan your hard drives for errors or take a deeper look at several performance figures coming from the storage unit.

First off, a file test. We fire off 64MB of data comprising out of sizes ranging from 0.5 KB to 8 MB. Check it out. As you can see once we pass 32KB file size, the drive kicks in hard, already pushing 250MB/sec. Maximum peak writes are nearing 500 MB/sec write while touching 525 MB read peaks.

As you can see, the SSD was a little fragmented after many benchmarks tests. Some say you need to erase the SSD, we say... that's real-world performance right there.

In HDTune above we average out roughly 358MB/sec on sequential writes. We peaked to roughly 404MB/sec.

Write performance above then, once we start to measure write performance we see that figures reach a continued write performance, averaging out at an average of 323 MB/sec with peaks to 3372 MB/sec.

HD Tune Pro allows random access read and write testing, a feature not available in other software tools. Check out the 1MB READ performance topping 453 MB/sec. In bold comparison, a fast OCZ Vertex 2 SSD would push 260 MB/sec at 1MB transfers here.

Overall great write IOPS performance as well. We get 332 MB/sec on the 1MB files. So each second this drive can write say 332 JPEG files with a size of 1 MB, per second.