Intel 520 ‘Cherryville’ Series 240GB SSD Review in RAID 0

CrystalDiskMark and PCMark 7

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 – Intel P67 Platform

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

Single Drive Configuration:

RAID 0 Configuration:

Benchmark Results: As with the AS-SSD benchmark, this uses incompressible data which diminishes the performance of the SF-2281 controller. The scores are right on par with other drives of its ilk and in a RAID 0 configuration everything gets amplified to crazy levels, outpacing the RevoDrive 3.

PCMark 7 Professional – Intel P67 Platform

We are continuing to use the new PCMark 7 software since they have updated it to version 7 which is specifcially designed for Windows 7. It measures the performance of the latest PC hardware across a variety of common scenarios. PCMark Vantage 7 supports both system level and component level benchmarking and comprises several different test suites but for the purposes of this review, we employed the secondary storage suite. The nice thing about it is that you can submit your scores online and compare against others.

Single Drive Configuration:

RAID 0 Configuration:

Benchmark Results: The 520 Series nearly cleaned up with all but one of the best scores for a single SATA based drive; although the margin of victory was minor in every category. The RAID 0 array was just slightly behind that of the PCI-E based RevoDrive 3.