The Intel SSD 320 Review: 25nm G3 is Finally Here
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 28, 2011 11:08 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Storage
- SSDs
- Intel
- Intel SSD 320
Performance vs. Transfer Size
All of our Iometer sequential tests happen at a queue depth of 1, which is indicative of a light desktop workload. It isn't too far fetched to see much higher queue depths on the desktop. The performance of these SSDs also greatly varies based on the size of the transfer. For this next test we turn to ATTO and run a sequential write over a 2GB span of LBAs at a queue depth of 4 and varying the size of the transfers.
I've created a second set of graphs that just looks at 3Gbps performance of a few drives to make things easier to read:
3Gbps sequential read/write performance at low queue depths is competitive with other 3Gbps drives as we've already seen. Intel's controller scales simlarly with transfer size as the Marvell controller used in the 510.
If you've got an AMD or Intel 6Gbps controller however you'll be let down by the performance of the 320:
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anthonyjcho - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
I just got the 40GB version of this drive for my work computer as a cache drive.I have a large DB files (1-2GB) that I access frequently and I needed a "reliable" SSD for my task. Crucial and Intel came to mind, and only Intel products could be sourced. By the way, I use a OCZ SSD at home for gaming for better read performance.
Long story short,
100-105 MB/s for Read/Write is drastic improvement over the 7200rpm HDD I was using.
My work is much more productive because I don't have to wait so long for data retrieval anymore.
I highly recommend it to any data analyst.
spacehead74 - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
I've been finding these on Ebay for less than $200/160gb. The 5-year warranty is a great selling point when using these for laptop upgrades.sqeeek - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Still using two of these as of October 2014. Not the fastest sequential r/w but the random reads + low latency are still mind-blowingly fast compared to a spinning disk. Reliability is great as well - I even bought one used.DocSportello - Monday, September 21, 2015 - link
I installed my 320 in early 2012, and it's still running strong. My first (and thus far only) SSD, so it was a huge step up from HDs.If the numbers I saw at the time were to be believed, 320's were significantly more reliable than the alternatives. I got a bit spooked by those ongoing reports of 8-megabyte crashes; was it just a matter of time until that happened to me? But those reports mostly involved a system crash and usually a power loss; that's rare for me on a desktop with a quality power supply and a UPS.
Anyway, for whatever reason, my 320 is doing well. The specs claimed a million hours MTBF; what did the real numbers turn out to be? Oddly, the SSD Toolbox shows less than a thousand hours of power-on time, which would be unbelievably low, except I saw a post somewhere suggesting that that number is more a count of read/write activity than powered on and ready.
If I were buying today, I'd look at a Samsung 850, figuring the 40 nm cells have got to be inherently more robust than today's typical 19 nm cells. But that's theory; meanwhile the Intel 320 keeps rolling along.