Intel 510 Series 250GB SATA 6G Solid State Drive Review
Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup
Why Marvell? Most other controllers out there can't scale nearly as well as the original Intel controllers. The only exceptions to that are Marvell and SandForce. Between those two, SandForce would have been a better choice, but they are in direct and heavy competition with Intel. While Intel has only allowed rebranding under the Kingston name, SandForce is shipping chips to literally dozens of SSD makers. Above that, manufacturers shipping SandForce are doing quite well these days. Even if Intel came knocking, I suspect SandForce would have just politely declined at this point in the game.
That leaves Marvell, who until only recently only had their chips in the Crucial C300 line. They are now branching out, and they likely see the Intel move as a necessary step to put them on the map.
Testing Methods
Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. PCMark, IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases. If you have any questions about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we'll help you out!
Test System Setup
We're breaking in a new SandyBridge testbed. Necessary for properly testing these new drives, even with the known issues. To get around this, we are using only the Intel SATA 6Gb/sec ports, which are known to not exhibit the inconsistent performance / connectivity issues.
PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and Kingston for supplying some of the components of our test rig.
| Hard Drive Test System Setup | |
| CPU | Intel Core i5-2500K |
| Motherboard | Asus P8P67 Deluxe |
| Memory | Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR3-2133 CL9 |
| Hard Drive | G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD |
| Sound Card | N/A |
| Video Card | BFG Geforce 8400 GS 512MB PCI |
| Video Drivers | Geforce 181.22 |
| Power Supply | Corsair CMPSU-650TX |
| DirectX Version | DX9.0c |
| Operating System | Windows 7 X64 |

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