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 ESTOverall 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 SandForce drives hold a 10% advantage over the Intel SSD 510 in this test. For truly light desktop workloads it's near impossible to offer better performance than SandForce as most of the data written never actually hits NAND.
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hybrid2d4x4 - Friday, June 10, 2011 - link
Slightly off topic question: in your review of the Agility 3, you guys mentioned that it's lower power characteristics are due to asynchronous NAND. Does the Agility 2 also use this?I want a SSD for a laptop I'm getting within the next 2 months and don't really care as much about performance, just power consumption and bang-for-buck.
tecsi - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
Appears that Agility3 120GB << 240GB with incompressible data (which apparently is typical).Would we see yet another big performance drop for 60GB? Need to add this review so we can see what we lose.
Perhaps the value of SATA III drops precipitously with each halving of SSD capacity?
tecsi - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
This would be helpful to see see "real world performance" in ONE place. For example, Agility 3 60GB, 120GB, 240GB and Vertex 3 120GB, 240GB.tecsi - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
Incompressible Read Speed: Vertex3 (497) 2.5 times faster than Agility 3 (203)? Is this correct? What accounts for this huge difference?erikejw - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Beware the Intel SSD 320 (and probably 510 too).Huge number of complete data losses for users.
Intel finally admits the problem exist.
To my knowledge noone has been able to retrieve any data.
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http://www.fudzilla.com/memory/item/23447-intel-co...
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"Intel is aware of the customer sightings on Intel SSD 320 Series. If you experience any issue with your Intel SSD, please contact your Intel representative or Intel customer support (via web: www.intel.com or phone: www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/contact/phone) . We will provide an update when we have more information.
Alan
Intel's NVM Solutions Group"
datalaforge - Saturday, July 23, 2011 - link
Thanks for all of the great lineups here. I'm wondering what you guys think about the Samsung 470 SSD. Also why is the Seagate Momentus XT the only Hybrid drive that I can find out there. It seems like such a good idea. Why haven't any competitors given Hybrids a shot?Carlu - Friday, September 16, 2011 - link
A) Can some one explain to me the different in "8GB span" vs "100% span"?http://ark.intel.com/compare/56577,56576,56585,565...
B) And how do I compare them?
drumm_22 - Wednesday, June 6, 2012 - link
I have been reading several of the SSD articles on AnAnd and reading reviews on Newegg. I have recently purchased a Sager notebook to use during my college years as an engineering student. I was wondering if an SSD would be worth the money right now or should i wait for SSD's to become more adavanced at cheaper?