Intel SSD 520 Review: Cherryville Brings Reliability to SandForce
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 6, 2012 11:00 AM ESTFinal Words
I've been a fan of SandForce's technology since it first showed up in OCZ's Vertex 2 Pro in late 2009. Performance has never been an issue with SandForce and because of the fact that the controller writes less than its competitors, the controller and drives based on it are well behaved over months of use. The biggest issue with SandForce has always been a lack of validation compared to other, bigger players like Intel and Samsung. SandForce relies on its partners to do a lot of the validation and testing that would normally be internalized at its competitors. Until now, SandForce hasn't really had a partner large enough to really throw a ton of resources at drive validation. Now that SandForce is under the LSI umbrella things may change, but until then we finally have a well validated SF-2281 drive: the Intel SSD 520.
I'm still curious to see if other bugs crop up but if Intel hasn't found anything else after twelve months of testing I'm willing to bet that either the SF-2281 is irreparably broken or the 520 is going to be a reliable SSD.
I only have one data point where the 520 behaves better than other SF-2281 based drives, but that alone is a perfect example of what you pay for with Intel. This is exactly what we've been waiting for. If you want the absolute fastest SSD on the market today, the Intel SSD 520 is the only drive to get. If you're put off by the price, Samsung's SSD 830 is an excellent alternative.
I'm going to save this next bit for a future article, but have a look at the 520's performance in our enterprise workloads compared to the Intel SSD 320:
| Enterprise SSD Performance | |||||
| Oracle Swingbench | MS SQL DailyUpdates | MS SQL WeeklyMaint | |||
| Intel SSD 320 300GB | 56.5 MB/s | 207.3 MB/s | 230.4 MB/s | ||
| Intel SSD 520 240GB | 67.2 MB/s | 376.7 MB/s | 418.1 MB/s | ||
The 320 is actually widely used in servers as it's very reliable and can last a good amount of time with the right amount of over-provisioning. The 520 just destroys it. The bigger benefit is that if you're dealing with a workload that's not already compressed, the 520 will guarantee you much better drive longevity than the 320 thanks to the fact that it's simply not writing as much data to NAND. If you're looking for an affordable way to get a ton of IOPS for your enterprise workloads, Cherryville may be your ticket...
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
138 Comments
View All Comments
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 ;)