The Intel SSD 330 Review (60GB, 120GB, 180GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 1, 2012 12:01 AM ESTPCMark 7
PCMark 7's secondary storage benchmark does little to show us differences between modern, high-performance SSDs as everything here scores within 5% of one another - but that's the point. For most mainstream client uses you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between two good 6Gbps SSDs. Worry more about cost and reliability than outright performance if you're considering an SSD for a normal machine. Anything you see here will be much faster than a mechanical drive.
Performance Over Time & TRIM
SandForce's controllers have always behaved poorly if you pushed them into their worst case scenario. Should you fill a SF-2281 based drive completely with incompressible data then continue to write to the drive with more incompressible data (overwriting some of what you've already written) to fill up the spare area you'll back the controller into a corner that it can't get out of, even with TRIM. It's not a terribly realistic situation since anyone using an SF-2281 SSD as a boot drive will at least have Windows (or some other easily compressible OS) installed, and it's fairly likely that you'll have other things stored on your SSD in addition to large movies/photos. Regardless, it's a corner case that we do have to pay attention to.
As we found out in our 520 review, Intel's firmware isn't immune to this corner case. I filled a 120GB SSD 330 with incompressible data. I then ran a 60 minute 4KB random write torture test (QD32), once again, with incompressible data. Normally I'd use HDTach to chart performance over time however HDTach measures performance with highly compressible data so we wouldn't get a good representation of performance here. Instead I ran AS-SSD to get a good idea for incompressible sequential performance in this worst case state. Afterwards, I TRIMed the drives and ran AS-SSD again to see if TRIM could recover the drive's performance.
| Intel SSD 330 - Resiliency - AS SSD Sequential Write Speed - 6Gbps | |||||
| Clean | After Torture | After TRIM | |||
| Intel SSD 330 120GB | 148.9 MB/s | 96.3 MB/s | 94.4 MB/s | ||
This is really the biggest problem with SandForce drives. If you're primarily storing large amounts of incompressible data, sequential write speeds suffer even further over the long haul.
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Lacrimosa - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Hello,Good review. I had been looking for Intel 330 for my laptop. I would like to have the data encrypted though and according to this review the 330 is not a good option for me then. What are the good comparable options then? Reliability and ability to encrypt are the qualities I would be looking for and it would be nice if the price weren't too high either.
P_Turner - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
I've just RMA'd an Intel 330 SSD 180 GB back to Newegg. I get a BSOD on each and every resume from sleep. Unfortunately, Newegg won't issue refunds for this SSD (a Cyber Monday special), although they will process an RMA if you pay for the shipping.Be sure to read the Intel SSD forum BEFORE the purchase. Lots of complaints over BSODs on the 330 and 520. Worse, the complaints are just ignored by Intel.
Just my opinion, but all Sandforce based SSDs are obsolete from the get go. It's also my opinion that a big name on the label means nothing if the company just blows off customer issues.
P_Turner - Sunday, December 30, 2012 - link
The new Intel 330 180 GB that Newegg sent me was the same as the one I RMA'd. Same BSOD issue, 100% repeatable. So the question at this point was: is my Asus x83-vb laptop incompatible with SSDs?To answer the question, I pulled my 64 GB Crucial M4 out of my desktop, where it is the OS and program disk. Of course, I imaged the M4 first. The M4 then went into my Asus x83-vb after a secure erase.
The result was that the Crucial M4 was flawless. Newegg has relented and is allowing me to return the Intel 330 for store credit in the form of an e-gift card.
I've ordered a 256 gb M4 from Newegg, and I will post the results -- good or bad -- provided that posts to this article remain open. It could be that the Asus's BIOS doesn't allow an SSD larger than 64 GB or it could be that I just got lucky with my old M4. I'll know in two weeks.
ghabhaducha - Saturday, January 5, 2013 - link
Hi Anand,Thanks for such an awesome review of drives, clearly you have a talent for journalism.
After reading the extensive information you have on SSDs at Anandtech, I decided to purchase 2x Intel 330 240GB for the purposes of RAID0. Now, the way I understood it, the 180GB model uses 12x "29f16b08ccme2" Intel 16GB 25nm NAND flash, which based on your reviews, is also used by the OCZ Vertex 3 240GB and Kingston HyperX 240GB. I was curious if the Intel 330 240GB used the same "29f16b08ccme2" flash OR does it use the "29f16b08ccme3" flash that is used in the Kingston HyperX 3k? I really didn't want pry open my SSDs and void the warranty, but I was curious if you had documented this during your reviews.
Thanks,
ghabhaducha