Intel series 320 SSD review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 3 of 12 Published by

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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.

Intel 320 Series SSD

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 320 Series SSD

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.

Intel 320 Series SSD

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.

Intel 320 Series SSDThe SSD - PCB with 20 Intel 25nm NAND flash memory ICs (10 on each side).

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