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
Overall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
Next up is PCMark Vantage, another system-wide performance suite. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PCMark Vantage, it ends up being the most real-world-like hard drive test I can come up with. It runs things like application launches, file searches, web browsing, contacts searching, video playback, photo editing and other completely mundane but real-world tasks. I’ve described the benchmark in great detail before but if you’d like to read up on what it does in particular, take a look at Futuremark’s whitepaper on the benchmark; it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to be a member of a comprehensive storage benchmark suite. Any performance impacts here would most likely be reflected in the real world.
PCMark Vantage doesn't look too good paired with the 510. On a 6Gbps controller the Intel SSD 510 performs in line with the 3Gbps Vertex 3, however the 6Gbps Vertex 3 is untouchable. And over a 3Gbps interface the 510 is no better than a C300.
The pure HDD tests (below) are, at best, SF-1200 level. The SF-2200 is untouchable here. Based on what we've seen thus far I'm guessing this has a lot to do with the random read performance of the 510 once more.
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AnnihilatorX - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Anand you didn't clarify very clearly what is the difference of naming between 510 series and X-25 G3.The introduction leads me to believe 510 is X-25 G3, or is it not?
Is X-25 G3 going to use 25nm flash instead, so it's another drive? If so, when is the release date of that, and how do we expect its performance compared to 510 in this review? Will the X-25 G3 uses a custom controller?
strikeback03 - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
As the article stated, the G3 (whatever it is officially called) will be a lower-performance part whose aim is to bring lower prices and better reliability to more mainstream segmentsMrStromberg - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
So I've been waiting for quite some time now for the new intel drives since the reviews in the past about how reliable and how long life an SSD has, promising that all of this would be better with these new generation drives. Although now I am faced with the potential "problem" of a 3Gbit bottle neck in mi macbook pro and as mentioned in the review above "these next-generation SSDs not only use 6Gbps SATA, they really need it." So where does that leave me? Should a go for a cheaper older drive which might be less reliable in the long run (but nobody really knows right?) or buy a new generation drive which might be suffering from a bottleneck? I didn't really understand why the new drives really need the 6Gbit SATA to function well? Can someone please explain or give me some advice.thank you
Denithor - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Best right now would probably be an Intel G2 drive. Fast enough and very good durability.The next generation drives aren't really going to perform much better on a 3Gb SATA port than the current generation already does, plus you have the worse durability inherent in the 25nm NAND chips.
Nentor - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Wow, so Intel has a gap in it's road map and goes the 3rd party route and brings us a product that is essentially slower than a consumer product (Vertex 3) from another manufacturer.They could have gone Sandforce, why not?
mateus1984 - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
http://forums.hexus.net/general-discussion/199892-...Drag0nFire - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Would love to see you run a traditional hdd through the new bench so we can see what sort of real world improvements can be expected from making the switch to an SSD...Great article. I'll be waiting for the x25-m G3. Keep on Intel about this!
wheel - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Thanks for the review Anand, but I am a little disappointed that there are a lot of synthetic benchmarks but no real world tests.By "real world tests" I mean separate tests for: booting into Windows; loading a web browser with 25 tabs of saved web page documents on the HDD; starting Star Craft and loading a map; copying a large amount of files to itself; running a batch Photoshop image transform job; starting IE6 from a stopped Windows XP Mode VM and opening a complex web page hosted on the local disk; running a intensive anti-virus scan on a specific (large) folder etc.
I know PC Mark and SysMark are meant to represent these real world test, but as individual consumers we have different usage profiles and by breaking down the results into individual tests we can better work out which drive is most appropriate for us, instead of studying the synthetic tests and making an educated guess.
Cheers,
Ian
Boogaloo - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
Seconded.A lot of people are complaining about the performance of the drive, and I'd like to know how much of a difference it actually makes in real world scenarios. If this drive comes within 10 ms of a vertex 3 loading up starcraft 2, then who cares?
iwod - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
If you read carefully the Anand Benchmarks does exactly just that.