Intel SSD 335 (240GB) Review

Random Read/Write Speed

The four corners of SSD performance are as follows: random read, random write, sequential read and sequential write speed. Random accesses are generally small in size, while sequential accesses tend to be larger and thus we have the four Iometer tests we use in all of our reviews.

Our first test writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time. We use both standard pseudo randomly generated data for each write as well as fully random data to show you both the maximum and minimum performance offered by SandForce based drives in these tests. The average performance of SF drives will likely be somewhere in between the two values for each drive you see in the graphs. For an understanding of why this matters, read our original SandForce article.

Random read performance has never been SandForce's biggest strength and even Intel couldn't massively improve it with its own firmware. The SSD 335 is in fact slower than the SSD 330 here.

Random write speed at small queue depths is also slower compared to the 520 and 330, although at queue depth of 32 the difference is negligible. 

Sequential Read/Write Speed

To measure sequential performance I ran a 1 minute long 128KB sequential test over the entire span of the drive at a queue depth of 1. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length.

Sequential read performance is identical to SSD 330, but sequential write speed is slightly slower. What's notable is sequential write performance with incompressible data: the Intel SSD 335 manages to beat both the 520 and Corsair's Force GS by a noticeable margin.