Intel 520 Series 240GB Solid State Drive Review

This week I had a blast working with a Intel 520 series 240GB Solid State Drive, this thing is as closest to a perfect woman as your gonna get. Its works really fast, does it quietly and doesn’t complain at all not even after a full 10hrs workload :-).

No seriously, solid state drives are a must have these days. Imaging putting one in your notebook saving energy and increasing your workflow as well. I have been watching the prices from the start when they still were sky high, nowadays it’s becoming more and more affordable and even for the common folk like me.

What is a Solid State Drive?
A solid-state drive (SSD in short), is a data storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently. SSD technology uses electronic interfaces compatible with traditional block I/O hard disk drives. SSDs do not employ any moving mechanical components, which distinguishes them from traditional magnetic disks such as hard disk drives (HDDs), which are electromechanical devices containing spinning disks and movable read/write heads. Compared to electromechanical disks, SSDs are typically less susceptible to physical shock, are silent, and have lower access time and latency, but are, at the time of writing this artcle, still more expensive per MB of storage then a ordinary HDD.

SSDs share the input/output interface technology developed for hard disk drives, thus permitting simple replacement for most applications.

As of 2010, most SSDs use NAND-based flash memory, which retains data without power. For applications requiring fast access, but not necessarily data persistence after power loss, SSDs may be constructed from random-access memory (RAM). Such devices may employ separate power sources, such as batteries, to maintain data after power loss.

Hybrid drives combine the features of SSD and HDD in the same unit, containing a large hard disk and an SSD cache to improve performance of frequently accessed data. These devices may offer near-SSD performance for many applications.

But lets get back on topic, here a overview on the Intel 520 series Solid State Drive. The Intel 240GB Solid State Drive is the second generation of SATA rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s) solid state drives from Intel.

The Intel SSD 520 series features 25-naometer (nm) Intel NAND Flash Memory and provides sequential reads and writes of up to 550 and 520 megabytes per second (MB/s), respectively, and 4KB random reads and writes op to 50k and 80k Input/Output Operations per second (IOPS), respectively.

The Intel SSD 520 Series is available in 60GB, 120GB, 180GB, 240GB and 480GB versions. The Intel SSD 520 Series comes in a 2.5-inch form factor, making it a perfect drop-in solution for standard hard disk drives (HDD’s) like the one in you notebook and/or any pc system that has SATA2 or 3 ports.

Lets have a closer look at the product and the drive itself, Read on…