The Intel SSD 540s (480GB) Review

ATTO

ATTO's Disk Benchmark is a quick and easy freeware tool to measure drive performance across various transfer sizes.

Intel 540s 480GBADATA Premier SP550 480GBADATA XPG SX930 480GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial BX200 480GBCrucial MX100 512GBCrucial MX200 500GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 150 480GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBSamsung 850 EVO M.2 500GBSamsung 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GBSanDisk X400 1TBToshiba Q300 480GB

The Intel 540s's performance is a bit uneven during the ATTO benchmark, but its write speed advantage over the SP550 is still quite clear.

AS-SSD

AS-SSD is another quick and free benchmark tool. It uses incompressible data for all of its tests, making it an easy way to keep an eye on which drives are relying on transparent data compression. The short duration of the test makes it a decent indicator of peak drive performance.

The AS-SSD test does very little to differentiate between drives, but it at least shows that the Intel 540s can reach similar peak speeds to its competition.

Idle Power Consumption

Since the ATSB tests based on real-world usage cut idle times short to 25ms, their power consumption scores paint an inaccurate picture of the relative suitability of drives for mobile use. During real-world client use, a solid state drive will spend far more time idle than actively processing commands. Our testbed doesn't support the deepest DevSlp power saving mode that SATA drives can implement, but we can measure the power usage in the intermediate slumber state where both the host and device ends of the SATA link enter a low-power state and the drive is free to engage its internal power savings measures.

We also report the drive's idle power consumption while the SATA link is active and not in any power saving state. Drives are required to be able to wake from the slumber state in under 10 milliseconds, but that still leaves plenty of room for them to add latency to a burst of I/O. Because of this, many desktops default to either not using SATA Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) at all or to only enable it partially without making use of the device-initiated power management (DIPM) capability. Additionally, SATA Hot-Swap is incompatible with the use of DIPM, so our SSD testbed usually has DIPM turned off during performance testing.

The slumber power state is working correctly on the Intel 540s and allows for very slightly lower idle power draw than the SP550. Active idle power is significantly improved over the SM2256 and is now behind only Samsung and Phison controllers. Silicon Motion's 40nm SM2258 clearly beats Marvell's 28nm 88SS1074 used in the SanDisk X400 and Crucial MX300.