The 2011 Mid-Range SSD Roundup: 120GB Agility 3, Intel 510 and More Compared
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 7, 2011 12:52 PM ESTAS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Performance
The AS-SSD sequential benchmark uses incompressible data for all of its transfers. The result is a pretty big reduction in sequential write speed on SandForce based controllers.
Peak read speed is obviously something the Vertex 3 does very well, while the P3 and 510 fall in second and third places, OCZ has a substantial lead. Now look at what happens when AS-SSD runs a pass of incompressible writes:
Corsair's P3 is now our leader. What's important to notice here is that Corsair's firmware allows for much higher sequential performance than what Intel outfitted the 510 with, however Intel's drive generally delivers better real world performance as we've seen from our 2011 Storage Bench tests.
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JasonInofuentes - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
"It's funny how little the recommendations have changed over the years. Intel still offers a good balance of performance and reliability, however if you're willing to take a risk on the reliability front you can get better value elsewhere."http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738
scook9 - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
Looks good. I recently got a 160GB Intel 320 drive for my M18x but since it has Sata 6Gbps I am going to be pretty tempted to trade up to a 510 down the road. Just could not get excited over that $$/GB for nowStargrazer - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
Awesome. Thanks.(first (non-french) comparison of current-gen ~128GB SSDs I've seen)
apexjr - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
Anand,Thank you for this! This is exactly what I have been waiting for.
dhanson8652 - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
The chart labels on page 5 are conflicting with both charts being labeled read/write write/read with the inverse white on orange text being correct and the black on orange text being incorrect.Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
Fixed :)Oxford Guy - Thursday, June 9, 2011 - link
240 GB Vertex 2 at some point... prettie please?You talk about the 240 GB drives offering best case performance. Don't you think people would like to know how good the performance of the 240 GB Vertex 2 is in comparison with 120 GB next-gen units like these?
apexjr - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
For me this article gives weight to the research I have done and the hours reading and analyzing other reviews.For the laptop I had chose the Intel 510 because it has the least power draw idle, 6 Gbps and a proven track record of reliability.
For my gaming machine I had chose the Vertex 3 240gb. Even with the reliability issues that might happen I have nightly backups running (Easy to setup with Windows 7) and spare drives to swap in should something happen.
Confusador - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
One of the things that's held me back from getting an SSD is that I always have at least 2 OSes installed, and a common data partition. Can anyone point me at info on how these drives handle that? I can't find anywhere that Anand has covered it in his roundups. I'd like to know how it affects performance, but what I'm really concerned about is drive life, if the partitioning interferes with the controller's ability to optimize wear leveling.cgeorgescu - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
It's amazing how a Corsair Force F120 (or some Vertex2) still manages to not be beaten that hard by these new arrivals. In pure benchmarks, the new drives have some impressive results but, as long as we're speaking about real-life scenarios, F120 suddenly appears in the graph not far under the new drives.