Hardware Intel Solid-State Drive 510 120GB Review

Intel enters the SATA 6Gbps ring with its own SSD based on a Marvell controller.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/05/18/intel-solid-state-drive-510-120gb-review/1

 

Always good to wake up to a SSD review

 

the intel 510 ssd is actually cheaper... albeit very slightly here in singapore compared to the vertex 3....

 

Quite a meh SSD considering the price, which is why I went for the M4.

 

The performance analysis compares this 120GB Intel drive to the Crucial M4 reviewed earlier, which is a 256GB drive and 60% more expensive, and it fails to achieve the same performance. Isn't performance supposed to scale with size or am I missing something here? Wouldn't it be fair (and an interesting read) to test the 250GB version of the Intel 510 and compare it to the M4-256GB?

 

Specifications;
Nominal capacity: 256GB
Formatted capacity: 238.47GB

The 120GB ... With a formatted capacity of 111GB,

Eh? I think someone's forgotten to update the table since the M4.

 

the drive capacities are way too low, even the 256gb versions dont have enough capacity for me, My installed programs + windows comes to well over 370gb, so using these ssd's as program drives really fails, I would be constantly unstalling and installing programs, on another note, nice to finally see the prices come down a bit, the m4 is still £350 though, I could build a whole pc for that, and bit tech's buyers guide pc is just another £100 or so more, if these ssd's are going to gain ground, they need to lower the prices for the 256gb versions by at least £100, I wouldnt buy a 120gb, the capacity is too low and the redunancy eats a large chunk of that, 14% writeoff is a good chunk of data on any drive, if they released a 256gb ssd for around £150, (3 times the price of a 2tb drive), it may convince me to part with the cash, until that happens, these drives are just way too expensive for the average gamer, if your using ur pc to encode video, then it makes sense though, the trade off in time saved V cost makes sense, other than that, its a huge waste of money just to play games a bit faster than a traditional drive.

 

+1
They're getting faster instead of cheaper...wrong choice for the mass market

 

I love the SSD performance and overall pacakge.

However, the technology moves forward but prices remain far too high for my liking, I always gave myself a benchmark of buying a 128gb drive when the price for a decent performer was £128 for the unit (which was around the same price I paid for raptors back in the day) - we seem to be a long way off that and I still have question marks over the long term life expectancy.

When it all satarted all we heard was this is the end of the hard disk disk drive, all I see now is that for the foreseeable future they simply compliment the storage devices as a means to simply put your OS and main program on and forget about using them for anything else.

 

Page 1, Paragraph 4: "The Marvell 9174 is a proven SATA 6Gbps controller, having been used in last year’s Crucial C300 series of SSDs, as well as the Crucial M4 (review coming soon)"

You've already reviewed the M4? http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2011/05/16/crucial-m4-256gb-review/1

Edit: You mention it again at the end, but you clarify it as the 128GB version of the M4, which makes more sense.

 

Theres a 120GB SSD on the marketplace for £125. I'm selling my own 64GB C300 for £70. Not so far off.

 

Thanks for the spot!

 

Awesome review, not such an awesome drive.

Thanks, one note though:

"Crucial M4 (Review coming soon!)"

It's come, before this one. Maybe drop the link in? (Unless it refers specifically to the 128GB M4, which it doesn't seem to in the context)

 

It's always good just to wake up when you get to my age.

 

If someone can release a 60GB SSD with 200mb or so sequential read and 20mb random for £50 I'll buy one but till then. Is there really any point to 500mb+ sequential read speed?

 

I don't see why manufacturers should lower prices if people are still buying them at the current price.

An SSD is a premium drive. If you want cheap, go mechanical.

I use a C300 as my boot disk for my main PC (with an 800GB data / Steam drive) and an 80GB X25 in my laptop. They cost me quite a bit, but I appreciate the speed.

You wouldn't expect Ferrari to lower their prices just to make them more available to the public?

Slightly lower price would be nice but £100 off is a bit harsh! A 256GB for £150 - what about a GTX590 for £100 off...

 

RAM was a super premium item. SSD need to start coming down in price so that a boot SSD + storage HD becomes the norm rather than enthusiast exception.

 

Is that "Need" so that you can buy one or just a general "Need".

There is no reason why it should become the norm - take my GPU suggestion - should it be the norm that high end GPUs become cheaper so that everyone can buy them?

What is wrong with "non-enthusiasts" using fast mechanical drives? They are still plenty fast, just not as lightning quick as an SSD.

 

You can't seriously expect people to look at this and not burst out laughing? One simply cannot compare an Ferrari to an SSD, even the GTX590 is an aweful analogy, the GTX590 is 2x GPU's, 2x RAM, 2x Cooling, 2x RAM and when you look at that you can see/feel believe that there are more components being used and thus you feel as though you got what you paid for - SSD's are not getting larger capacities, they are becoming cheaper to manufacture but the general operation remains the same.

The only real performance gain for a normal PC user with SSD's are load times, the nature of the chips means that they degrade if you re-write too much to it (although this is a constant state of upgrade) - Raptors were premium drives back in the day, twice the price of a regular HDD (the HDD being double the capacity too).

Today 2TB drives are £60 so a 128gb SSD @ >£200 is an unreasonable amount of money, especially as the technology is now a tech node set smaller and cheaper to make, so my point is valid - I am all for paying a premium for a performance boost, but seriously the price ratio is far too high - of course I appreciate that development costs need to be absorbed for early adoptors, but we're past that now, I sincerely hope that one of these SSD providers realises this and start a trend

 

Laugh your way to the bank then thinking of the money you are saving not buying one...

You could have broken down my analogy about the ferrari further and explained about how many more parts they have etc etc. I merely used it to define a premium item.

Maybe one day ssd manufacturers will lower prices, but they don't "need" to until they feel they are losing money by people not buying them. Maybe Apple "need" to lower their prices so I will buy one, but I am sure they won't.

Stick with your hdd if you can't afford an ssd, you don't "need" one...