The Intel SSD 330 Review (60GB, 120GB, 180GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 1, 2012 12:01 AM ESTPCMark 7
PCMark 7's secondary storage benchmark does little to show us differences between modern, high-performance SSDs as everything here scores within 5% of one another - but that's the point. For most mainstream client uses you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between two good 6Gbps SSDs. Worry more about cost and reliability than outright performance if you're considering an SSD for a normal machine. Anything you see here will be much faster than a mechanical drive.
Performance Over Time & TRIM
SandForce's controllers have always behaved poorly if you pushed them into their worst case scenario. Should you fill a SF-2281 based drive completely with incompressible data then continue to write to the drive with more incompressible data (overwriting some of what you've already written) to fill up the spare area you'll back the controller into a corner that it can't get out of, even with TRIM. It's not a terribly realistic situation since anyone using an SF-2281 SSD as a boot drive will at least have Windows (or some other easily compressible OS) installed, and it's fairly likely that you'll have other things stored on your SSD in addition to large movies/photos. Regardless, it's a corner case that we do have to pay attention to.
As we found out in our 520 review, Intel's firmware isn't immune to this corner case. I filled a 120GB SSD 330 with incompressible data. I then ran a 60 minute 4KB random write torture test (QD32), once again, with incompressible data. Normally I'd use HDTach to chart performance over time however HDTach measures performance with highly compressible data so we wouldn't get a good representation of performance here. Instead I ran AS-SSD to get a good idea for incompressible sequential performance in this worst case state. Afterwards, I TRIMed the drives and ran AS-SSD again to see if TRIM could recover the drive's performance.
| Intel SSD 330 - Resiliency - AS SSD Sequential Write Speed - 6Gbps | |||||
| Clean | After Torture | After TRIM | |||
| Intel SSD 330 120GB | 148.9 MB/s | 96.3 MB/s | 94.4 MB/s | ||
This is really the biggest problem with SandForce drives. If you're primarily storing large amounts of incompressible data, sequential write speeds suffer even further over the long haul.
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Oxford Guy - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Yeah, the old version of the software detected the drive as being a 500 series.This looks like a bug to me.
A5 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
The next paragraph of the article shows that the latest SSD Toolbox properly detects the drive. It's safe to assume that that is what Anand used for testing.chrnochime - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
I heard about the 8mb problem with intel 320 SSDs. Is that still problem with these new SF based SSDs?Per Hansson - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
That problem is only with Intel's own controller, not Sandforce so this drive and the 520 should be fine...marioyohanes - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
I have one of this SSD installed on my 2011 Mac, and it doesn't work well with sleep and also always caused major crash after software update (like any other SF 22xx SSD). Then my friend who recently bought HP Envy also got this SSD by default from HP, guess what, screen goes black after sleep (not all the time, but most of the time), crashed after 1 month he had to reinstalled the entire thing and lost his data. Now, after 6 months and after 5 times RMA, he ended up reformatting his drive every month.I just wish Anand more honest by telling people the truth about SSD, specially SF based controller, because after trying more than 5 SF based SSD, I can say they're sucks! buy it only if you're planning to reformat your drive every now and then. Good for benchmark score, but not for daily use. Contest only probably. However, my Intel 320 and Crucial M4 stays reliable even after years of heavy use.
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
I, and two colleagues, have 240 GB Sandforce drives (1x Vertex 2, 2x Chronos DX). None of them have given us any problems. I'm using mine in a 2008 Macbook Pro and they are using theirs in 2011 Macbook Pros. All of us have TRIM enabled.Did you make sure to update the firmware to the latest version before using the drive in your Mac?
Also, older versions of OS X should have the feature disabled that copies the contents of RAM to disk when the machine is put to sleep.
angelsmaster - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - link
hi, i just bought yesterday this intel 330 series, and i am also using mac 2011, haven't updated yet cause i could not find the firmware ware update for this 240 gb, i could only find are for 60 ~ 180 gig firmware update, i tried downloading and its error due to .exe . and the TRIM is not supported.. and idea on this? thank!eviloz_i - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
i have a 320 drive (120gb) a 520 drive (60gb) and a 330 (60gb), the first two on intel mb, third on asus mball installed directly with windows7 x64 without any ssd-specific procedure in the bios or in the os (just for paranoia, checked if trim was enabled after install. it was)
they all perform flawlessly, all pc regularly jump in an out of both turn-off-video screen saver and suspend.
I never benchmarked them, i dont need astral performance, but they are fast.
murakozi - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
Swapped out all HDD-s in our office and home computers (that is: HP 6910p, HP NC 6400, HP TC 4400, 2 x Dell Optiplex 790 DT, Dell Optiplex 755 DT, HP XW8400) without issues. OS variety: XP Prof, Vista Prof SP2, Win7 Prof).Works like a charm, any time. The only product I ever had problems with was Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB, which - even after several installs and OS-es - produced corrupted blocks and r/w failures within days.
IMHO the SSD products have matured enough to use them in "mission critical" enviroments (I have them also in our office server, the old box literally flies...)
Ammaross - Thursday, August 2, 2012 - link
I've rolled out 10 identical workstations, each outfitted with a 60GB Intel 330 drive, all running the same Win7 image. Of those 10, 1 immediately started giving us problems. The OS would "stutter," locking up for seconds at a time. I narrowed it down to the SATA link power management features of Windows. Apparently, these drives still have issues when their SATA link is put into idle/low power modes. Replaced the drive with a Vertex 3 and all was well.