Intel series 320 SSD review - The SSD NAND FLASH partitions

The SSD NAND FLASH partitions

So the storage unit we'll be testing today is a 300GB version. Here's how that works.

First off, the controller fully supports TRIM by the way. Intel places a NAND flash partition of 20 ICs onto one PCB. The 300GB partition of NAND FLASH ICs will get tied to the 10 channel Intel controller based IC, assigned for multi-channel IO.

Intel uses Hynix cache memory; Intel certainly increased in that area going from 32MB on Postville to 64MB of it on the 320, obviously to be able to deal with storing small files nice and fast.

After a format of the SSD, out of the 300GB advertised merely 279GB remains available for usage, that's roughly a 7% loss of space to what is advertised.

Now we mentioned it already, but the Intel  controller will support up to roughly 280MB/s sequential read and write speeds, that's nearing 30MB/s on one of the available ten channels. Combined, the bandwidth is impressive for a single non RAID drive running over SATA2.

The SSD - PCB with 20 Intel 25nm NAND flash memory ICs (10 on each side).