Intel SSD 520 Review: Cherryville Brings Reliability to SandForce

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• iLLz - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  There you go, being all logical and stuff.

• DanSmith - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 - link

  +1

• kyuu - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  So, Intel wants people to pay a huge price premium over drives with identical flash and an identical controller? For what? Some validation testing and a custom firmware? Despite the fact that they source their own flash giving them a price advantage over everyone except maybe Samsung? Please.
  
  Also, the 240GB is *more* than twice as expensive as as the 120GB? Why wouldn't you just buy two 120GB drives then? I doubt the performance difference is even worth noting, and once Intel's own new RST drivers come out that support passing the TRIM command to RAID arrays comes out, you can R0 them and get *better* performance than a single 240GB.

• FunBunny2 - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 - link

  *NOT* identical flash or controller. Anand spent much of the text explaining that.

• NitroWare - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link

  Not sure if the PCB is completely custom or Intel just put their logo on a slightly modified circuit board - and then there is the Bill of Materials for the supporting components.
  
  Corsair have been claiming publicly they went with a custom PCB for their Force 3 and even put up oscilloscope eye diagrams to 'prove' that their signal integrity as superior to a generic reference PCB

• Coup27 - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  Anand, could you please update Bench with the 830 results? They appear to have been forgotten about adding into Bench.

• Narrlok - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 - link

  I second this request. I was about to post about this as well since I wanted to compare the 830 with this drive.

• beginner99 - Monday, February 6, 2012 - link

  Well it seems obvious especially also because of the delay that the general advice here is to not touch OCZ and especially Sandforce seems to be more than true. There obviously must be quite a lot of bugs in the sandforce firmware.
  
  But then the price premium? I don't see it. You can get a crucial m4 that preforms just as good and has a very good track record in terms of reliability. (ignoring this 5000 hr bug...but it doubt even intel would spot that)
  
  While it is sure a fast and reliable drive, the m4 is too while costing much less. And the Samsung isn't bad either.

• eman17j - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link

  they fixed the 5000 hr bug

• eman17j - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link

  Also the newer line ocz came out with uses the Indilix controller