Intel SSD 520 Review: Cherryville Brings Reliability to SandForce

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• GrizzledYoungMan - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  Excellent review, Anand. I really appreciate your focus on reliability/compatibility over performance in your latest SSD reviews; that really reflects my own experience in terms of where SSDs need to improve.
  
  Do you (or anyone) know when the Intel 520 is scheduled to be available for sale? I didn't notice this information in your article.
  
  Here's hoping it's soon. I am returning a newly purchased Crucial m4 (which has a number of rather absurd semi-known/unacknowledged issues, like stuttering with Intel RST drivers installed, and failing to wake up from sleep) and seeking to replace it with an Intel drive. After owning OCZ and Crucial, I am really looking forward to not having to extensively modify my system just to get things working.

• GrizzledYoungMan - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  This just came up on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Intel-SSDSC2CW120A3K5-2-5-In...
  
  Price looks right, and is sold by Amazon directly. Can anyone confirm that this model number is correct?

• ckryan - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  Cherryville has been selling in small quantities for weeks now. Benches and pics have been out there. I thoroughly enjoy every one of Anand's SSD reviews as it's never just a review of the drive, but in this case the 520's performance profile has been established well in advance of NDA expiration.
  
  Intel's reliability is well deserved IMHO. For those of us wishing against hope for Intel's 10 channel 6gbps controller, keep hoping. As late as 60 days ago, I was hoping that the 520 would utilize the Marvell controller, but when Cherryville started shipping a few weeks back, all hope was lost. And it was pretty obvious when the specs were leaked months and months ago.
  
  Intel's own controller is not fast by the standards of today, but Intel really got to the heart of the matter with the first and second gen drives, which is speed is superfluous without reliability.
  
  SandForce drives have been tamed to a large extent with the 3.3.2FW, but I'm unconvinced of their long term reliability -- the nDurance chart literature reproduced in the article is not realistic in any way, and in my experience SF drives tend to lose in endurance compared to it's competitors. I still own and use SF drives, but when I need reliability over speed, SF is not the way I personally choose to go.
  
  I respect Intel's decision to go SF, and in it's entirely likely that no drive has received the internal scrutiny that the 520 has -- and I'm sure it will pay dividends. But I won't be selling my older Intel drives on eBay anytime soon.

• GrizzledYoungMan - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  Good comment, and useful thoughts, thank you.
  
  Since you seem to have a lot of experience with these devices, and similar priorities as me, which would you pick for the system disk of a workstation: the 320 or the 520, both at 120GB? I'm on a p55 mobo with a 3gb/s SATA controller, FYI.
  
  While the performance of the 520 series is attractive, I'm still inclined to believe that I wouldn't notice the real world difference between the two. In which case the 320 series wins on demonstrated reliability.

• ckryan - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  The 320 has a great record -- it's one reliability fault was the rare 8MB error, since corrected. Firmware is so crucial with SSDs, and the actual act of updating FW can cause issues of it's own (ala the Samsung 830, another excellent drive).
  
  On a 3gbps Intel mobo port you won't get the sequential speeds, but you will get the good random performance and the 520 handily bests it's fore-bearers in that area.
  
  So I suppose that the issue of price should be considered. The 120GB 320 and 520 are going to be nearly the same price -- so you'd be getting more with the 520. I would say if you're comfortable with it, get the 520.
  
  Regardless of whether SSD or HDD, you should be in a position that if the drive dies 20 minutes from now, restoring your data to it shouldn't be a problem. With that in mind, you can probably bet that the 520 will hold out for it's 5 year warranty. If it doesn't, you still have a 5 year warranty.
  
  As an aside, I recently bought a 320 series 120GB just to have on hand should the need arise, and it is pretty magnificent. I think most people would be just as happy with a 320 than a faster 520 -- the people who crave speed are going to get the fastest drive anyway, so for everybody else the 320 series is still a viable option.

• Roland00Address - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  The 80gb intel 320 has routinely been on sale for the last month from several different online retailers. The sales involve mail in rebates but you see final MIR prices being between 70 to 90 dollars for the 80gb.
  
  The 120gb intel 320 on the other hand hasn't really gone on sale in Janurary, only time it went on sale in the last few months was a black friday sale (and BF is not a normal thing.)

• GrizzledYoungMan - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 - link

  Just bought a 120gb Intel 320 series SSD for $182.00 - nearly $1.50 a gig. Not bad.
  
  Between the reliability (both in terms of software, architecture, and power loss protection) and the insane IO performance on reads at lower queue depths, I feel confident I made the right choice.

• alpha754293 - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  Reading this, I'm tempted to buy the 180 GB version because I will be using it in a HPC environment.
  
  And if the OCZ Vertex 3 is going to have BSOD issues, I'd rather pay a little bit of a premium or lose a little in storage capacity in order to make sure that the system will be humming along perfectly/nicely.
  
  Such a shame/waste that the Vertex 3s are relegated to being just data drives.

• neotiger - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  It doesn't look like Intel 520 has any capacitors to prevent data loss.
  
  So how is this SSD any different from the 5,000 other SandForce SSD's already in the market, except this one is much more expensive than the others?

• Sunrise089 - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  Read the article ;)