Intel SSD 510 120GB Features & Blueprint

The SSD 510 comes in 120GB ($270) and 250GB ($590) capacities, both of which drop Intel's traditional 7mm design that uses a shim to reach the 9.5mm thickness of a standard 2.5" bulldoze. The drives casing now measures iii.92 10 2.74 x 0.37" (99.8 x 69.63 x 9.5mm) and weighs 0.18lbs (81.6 grams).

The 120GB version boasts read and write speeds of 450MB/s and 210MB/s, while the larger 250GB version is considerably faster at 500MB/s reads and 315MB/s writes. Naturally, the SATA 6Gb/s interface is essential to achieving these staggering read speeds, but this presents a pocket-sized issue: Intel'south new Sandy Bridge platform is the only one to provide native SATA 6Gb/s back up -- and it does so with merely two ports.

Third party embedded solutions such as the Marvell 88SE9128 tin can provide motherboards with SATA 6Gb/south support, but have very poor performance compared to Intel's implementation. That said, there is a new Marvell 88SE9182 controller that tin match the operation of Intel's six series chipsets, then it'southward fair to say that support for the 6Gb/south SATA interface is improving.

The 510 Series consumes a mere 380 milliwatts of power when in use and 100 milliwatts in standby, which is considerably lower than drives such as the OCZ Vertex 3.

Every bit mentioned before, the SSD 510 comes loaded with 34nm MLC NAND flash memory. Our review sample has sixteen 8GB Intel/Micron 29F16B08JAMDD ICs for a full capacity of 128GB.

One time formatted in Windows, the original 128GB drops to 111GiB, meaning you lot lose roughly thirteen% from the GB to GiB conversion along with the spare area. With an MSRP of $270, the SSD 510 120GB costs $2.25 per gigabyte, which is average past SSD standards.

Intel has given the SSD 510 a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) rating of one.2 million hours. Although this is lower than the ane.five 1000000 hours that most manufacturers charge per unit their SSDs at, Intel has an impeccable track tape for reliability and the SSD 510 serial goes through the same validation and testing as previous SSDs.

Furthermore, Intel's three-twelvemonth warranty should let customers sleep comfortably at night knowing they're covered for a reasonable timeframe.