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
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.
The 320 falls in the middle of the pack - around the performance of a SF-1200 drive like the Force F120 but no where near what you'll get from a 6Gbps Vertex 3.
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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.