discussion Intel 520 240GB Cherryville SSD Review

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Windows 7 Start Up / Adobe CS5 Load Time

Windows 7 Start Up with Boot Time A/V Scan Performance

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. Where Windows 7 has become nearly ubiquitous for solid state drive enthusiasts we have chosen Windows 7 64bit Ultimate as our Operating System. In previous load time tests we would use the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line; this however is no longer the case. We have not only added in a secondary Anti-Virus to load on startup, but also an anti-malware program. We have set Super Anti-Spyware to initiate a quick scan on Windows start-up and the completion of the quick scan will be our new finish line.

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While not quiet as large a difference as we thought, this first place finish does firmly establish the Intel 520’s bona fides. It may not be as large an improvement as we had hoped, but considering the OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS is the fastest drive we have seen – up until the 520 that is – an improvement of 3 full seconds is still extraordinary. When compared against the Intel Compute NAND wielding Kingston HyperX 240GB an improvement of 7 seconds just underscores how much better Intel is at creating high performance firmware than anyone else, including the controller manufacturer!

AAdobe CS5 Load Time

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!

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When you get into sub ten second territory it is hard to tell the difference between the “best of the best” and the merely “second best”. In all likelihood the Intel 520 is slightly faster than all the other drives in the charts and that the margin of error is simply hiding this difference. It really is amazing when something as bloated as Adobe is not bloated enough to slow down ultra high performance drives.

 

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Firefox Offline / Real World Data Transfers

Firefox Portable Offline Performance

Firefox is notorious for being slow on loading tabs in offline mode once the number of pages to be opened grows larger than a dozen or so. We can think of fewer worse case scenarios than having 100 tabs set to reload in offline mode upon Firefox startup, but this is exactly what we have done here.

By having 100 pages open in Firefox portable, setting Firefox to reload the last session upon next session start and then setting it to offline mode, we are able to easily recreate a worse case scenario. Since we are using Firefox portable all files are easily positioned in one location, making it simple to repeat the test as necessary. In order to ensure repetition, before touching the Firefox portable files, we have backed them up into a .rar file and only extracted a copy of it to the test device.

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Once again the Intel 520 is right at the top of our charts and proves that Intel knows how to create one heck of a Solid State Drive.

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 10.00GB contiguous file and a folder containing 400 subfolders with a total 12,000 files varying in length from 200mb to 100kb (10.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy (set to 1 file depth) and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found.

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With a clean sweep of the real world tests, it appears that the Intel 520 really is the best of the best when it comes to TRIM environments.

 

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Non-TRIM Environment Testing

Non-TRIM Environment Testing

While most high performance drives are a force to be reckoned with in TRIM environments, the same is not true of non-TRIM enabled systems. This is one area that separates the merely good from the truly great. To recreate a non-TRIM environment, we first modified our testbed so that it would not pass on the necessary cleaning commands. Meanwhile, to artificially induce a degrade state we ran eight hours of IOMeter set to 100% random, 100% write, 4k chunks of data at a 64 queue depth across the entire drive’s capacity. At the end of this test, the IOMeter file is deleted and the drive was then tested. This will replicate drive performance after extended heavy usage prior to any self maintenance routines kicking in and is indicated by the “Dirty” results below.

In order to allow each drive’s self-maintenance routines to kick in, we then wait 30 minutes (Dirty + 30 results) with the system at idle and rerun the tests.

To help give a detailed and practical overall picture of a given drive’s ability in this severe environment we have chosen two tests: one synthetic and the other more real world in nature.

Synthetic Results

Since reads are usually not greatly affected by a degraded state, for our synthetic non-trim test, we have chosen our standard sequential write test. By opting for this test and not one of our other shorter tests, the controller will not be able to compensate for being in a degraded state by using over-provisioning, caching or other similar buffers to hide the true state of the drive. To put it simply, by writing data across the entire drive, we will quickly see how big an impact this environment will have on them.

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Real World Results

For a real world application we have opted for our standard Vista load time test.

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As you can see, the Intel 520 is slightly better at getting itself out of a degraded state compared to a typical SandForce SF2281 drive but it still isn't the best solution when compared against Marvel's first and second generation controllers. But (and this is a huge factor in these tests) at the very top of the charts there is second set of performance numbers for the 520. Thanks to the miracle of Intel's Toolbox, it only take a few seconds – or more if the drive is highly degraded like our was – to bring it back to full performance. This quick, easy and intuitive software solution turns what is a rather sub-optimal choice into easily the best choice available for ALL environments.

Unlike even the mighty Marvel controller there is no need to wait all that long or even let your system idle to regain like-new performance. Simply set up a once a week maintenance schedule and forget all about TRIM. The program only requires at least 1GB of space and a few moments of your time. This truly is amazing as we never thought we would be able to recommend a SandForce SF2281-based drive for non-TRIM environments.

Unfortunately, it is not all good news though. You cannot run the toolbox on RAID’ed 520s without first breaking the array, so the 520 may not be a great option for RAID configurations. We'll be testing this out a bit later in the week with a follow up RAID review.

 

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SATA 2 Performance

SATA 2 Performance

In a perfect world everyone investing in a new solid state drive would have access to a SATA 6Gb/s controller which could pass on the TRIM command. In reality not everyone has this and for many the decision comes down either giving up TRIM – never a good idea with most controllers – and running it off a secondary controller; or taking a performance hit and running in SATA 2.0 mode.

These tests will consist of some of our real world and synthetic benchmarks run on our standard 1155 test-bed; but the drive will be attached to an SATA 2 port.

For synthetic we have opted for the newcomer to our charts: Anvil Storage Utilities Pro. For real world we have opted for our Adobe test. These two tests should give you a very good idea of the level of performance impact you can expect from running a modern SATA 6 drive in compatibility mode.

Much like any SATA 6gb/s drive, the performance impact from running it in SATA 3gb/s mode is rather large. Luckily, the more refined firmware coupled with a higher starting point means the 520 is actually a very good choice for systems that do not have any SATA 6gb/s controllers. Of course, with the Intel toolbox even third party SATA 6gb/s solutions would still be better than running on SATA 3gb/s ports as TRIM is no longer an issue.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

Some companies are content to be first to market with an SSD and then spend months and months squashing bugs which had no business being in firmware released to the general public. Intel on the other hand tends to chart a safer course and while they may not be able to take advantage of early adopter sales, they rarely –with a few exceptions- release a product that isn’t rock solid in every respect. This situation carries over into the reasoning behind the 520 series’ introduction so late into the SandForce game.

The current enthusiast level SSD market is cluttered with SF2281 drives which all seem to be clones of one another which tends to make for a boring, uneventful playing field. But while every other manufacturer seems content to take a cookie cutter design and slap their own label on it, Intel’s 520 is refreshingly different. It uses a custom firmware to surpass the performance levels set by OCZ’s Toggle Mode NAND-equipped Vertex 3 MaxIOPS and become the fastest drive we have ever tested. This supremacy doesn’t continue through every test but when the dust settled, the 520 240GB sat atop our charts.

While its benchmark numbers were some of the best around, what really distinguishes the 520 series is its adaptability to a wide variety of situations. Whether you use TRIM or have an OS that can’t pass on the command, Intel’s SSD Toolbox allows the 520 series to be brought back to a like-new state with the click of a button. There’s no longer a need to run background garbage collection routines or provide long (an inefficient) idle scenarios to ensure a drive is in tip-top shape. Unfortunately, Intel still hasn’t figured out how to implement the Toolbox’s cleaning routines on RAID setups but we wouldn’t be surprised to see this ability added in a future revision.

In our opinion, the Intel 520 240GB provides a breath of fresh air in a market that was threatened with stagnation. To their credit, Intel may have waited a long time to introduce these drives but even now, more than a year after the SF2281 drives first became available, the competition really has no way to keep up. The relative maturity of the 520’s firmware coupled with excellent software has demonstrated why we continually state that an SSD lives or dies by the support a company gives it. In this case, the 520 series is so far ahead that we’re used to, it is nearly impossible to recommend a different drive in this price bracket. It may be a bit expensive but the peace of mind granted by a new yet mature product and a 5 year no hassle warranty are priceless in our eyes. If anything, Intel has once again proven that when they do something, they take the time do it right.

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