The Intel SSD 510 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 2, 2011 1:23 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Storage
- SSDs
- Intel
- Intel SSD 510
AnandTech Storage Bench 2010
To keep things consistent we've also included our older Storage Bench. Note that the old storage test system doesn't have a SATA 6Gbps controller, so we only have one result for the 6Gbps drives.
The first in our benchmark suite is a light/typical usage case. The Windows 7 system is loaded with Firefox, Office 2007 and Adobe Reader among other applications. With Firefox we browse web pages like Facebook, AnandTech, Digg and other sites. Outlook is also running and we use it to check emails, create and send a message with a PDF attachment. Adobe Reader is used to view some PDFs. Excel 2007 is used to create a spreadsheet, graphs and save the document. The same goes for Word 2007. We open and step through a presentation in PowerPoint 2007 received as an email attachment before saving it to the desktop. Finally we watch a bit of a Firefly episode in Windows Media Player 11.
There’s some level of multitasking going on here but it’s not unreasonable by any means. Generally the application tasks proceed linearly, with the exception of things like web browsing which may happen in between one of the other tasks.
The recording is played back on all of our drives here today. Remember that we’re isolating disk performance, all we’re doing is playing back every single disk access that happened in that ~5 minute period of usage. The light workload is composed of 37,501 reads and 20,268 writes. Over 30% of the IOs are 4KB, 11% are 16KB, 22% are 32KB and approximately 13% are 64KB in size. Less than 30% of the operations are absolutely sequential in nature. Average queue depth is 6.09 IOs.
The performance results are reported in average I/O Operations per Second (IOPS):
If there’s a light usage case there’s bound to be a heavy one. In this test we have Microsoft Security Essentials running in the background with real time virus scanning enabled. We also perform a quick scan in the middle of the test. Firefox, Outlook, Excel, Word and Powerpoint are all used the same as they were in the light test. We add Photoshop CS4 to the mix, opening a bunch of 12MP images, editing them, then saving them as highly compressed JPGs for web publishing. Windows 7’s picture viewer is used to view a bunch of pictures on the hard drive. We use 7-zip to create and extract .7z archives. Downloading is also prominently featured in our heavy test; we download large files from the Internet during portions of the benchmark, as well as use uTorrent to grab a couple of torrents. Some of the applications in use are installed during the benchmark, Windows updates are also installed. Towards the end of the test we launch World of Warcraft, play for a few minutes, then delete the folder. This test also takes into account all of the disk accesses that happen while the OS is booting.
The benchmark is 22 minutes long and it consists of 128,895 read operations and 72,411 write operations. Roughly 44% of all IOs were sequential. Approximately 30% of all accesses were 4KB in size, 12% were 16KB in size, 14% were 32KB and 20% were 64KB. Average queue depth was 3.59.
The gaming workload is made up of 75,206 read operations and only 4,592 write operations. Only 20% of the accesses are 4KB in size, nearly 40% are 64KB and 20% are 32KB. A whopping 69% of the IOs are sequential, meaning this is predominantly a sequential read benchmark. The average queue depth is 7.76 IOs.
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someguy11 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Hey AnandI've been reading your SSD bibles for years, searching and keeping abreast of the latest SSD news so I'd know the best before taking the plunge.
Well, I took the plunge after reading some reviews of the Samsung SSDs elsewhere. The price of a 60GB ($90) was too hard to pass up. In short I'm happy. Very happy.
Why dont any Samsungs appear in these exhaustive SSD lists? Do you have plans to do so?
sequoia464 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
I have to agree with some of the earlier comments on the size of the drives tested. Hopefully you can promptly add the Vertex 3 and this new Intel in the 120 GB flavors to your SSD BENCH when they are available. The larger capacity drives are just unafordable for quite a few of us, at least to me anyway.Too bad the manufacturers don't send you the smaller capacity drives as well initially, although I understand why they don't. All of the Vertex3 results that I have seen so far are on the 240 GB drive also.
As comprehensive as the SSD bench currently is I'm sure that the 120 Gb versions will eventually be in there.
Thanks for the review.
Rasta_Cook - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
It would be really nice if the corsair performance 3 could be benched and compared to intel 510, both use the same controller, however the corsair p3 has barely any reviews online even though it has been available for a while now.yekn - Sunday, March 6, 2011 - link
actually Corsair P3 has the same level high sequential number and poor random number, which lead me to believe P3 and 510 are using the same firmware with different Nand.looks like Intel not only uses 3rd party controller but also 3rd party firmware.
Ryomitomo - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
I would also like to find out how this SSD perform against the rest. This drive had been on the market for a while now. Thank you!RealGsus - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
Hi guys,I really hope you can help me out. I'm putting together a new system and am looking for a new SSD. I've been awaiting the arrival of the new intel drive, but I'm a little disappointed with its performance.
So I'm wondering which would be the best choice for a pretty much gaming-system.
Crucial C300 128GB
Intel G2 120GB
Intel 510 120GB
Guess it's narrowed down to these three, since the Vertex three is month away and also the C400 shouldn't be coming within the next weeks?
Thanks in advance for any opinions on this :)
Kind regards,
Gsus
princekermit - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
I have the C300 128 and I am very pleased with it.RealGsus - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
Hi guys,I really hope you can help me out. I'm putting together a new system and am looking for a new SSD. I've been awaiting the arrival of the new intel drive, but I'm a little disappointed with its performance.
So I'm wondering which would be the best choice for a pretty much gaming-system.
Crucial C300 128GB
Intel G2 120GB
Intel 510 120GB
Guess it's narrowed down to these three, since the Vertex three is month away and also the C400 shouldn't be coming within the next weeks?
Thanks in advance for any opinions on this :)
Kind regards,
Gsus
Sampleboy - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
Any chance we could get the benchmarks for the OCZ RevoDrive X2 thrown into the mix for comparison? It's about the same price point now as the Intel 510 so I'm debating between the two.hyperasus - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
I do not understand why Anand didn't include the latest Corsair drives in this review. Has Corsair done something to offend AnandTech?