Intel series 520 240GB SSD review - Product showcase

Product showcase

The following images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon 450D 12 MegaPixel.

Right then, above packaging. Intel's latest and greatest comes in 60, 120, 180, 240 and 480GB packages. Performance is listed at 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write with 80,000 IOPS at 4k random write aligned disk access with our tested 240GB model.

And there it is, this is the 2.5" SATA III 240 GB 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 it's 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 chipset based products (H67/P67/Z68/X79).

Included in the bundle is a 3.5" bracket, SATA cable, power converter cable, some screws and once SSD.

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 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.