Intel 320 Series 300GB SSD Review w/ 25nm Flash!

CrystalDiskMark and PCMark Vantage

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.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 – Intel P67 Platform

Benchmark Results: The Intel 320 Series had a very good showing on the sequential tests as well as the 4k reads. The 4k writes were about half of the SandForce drives although Intel has informed us that some benchmarks (CrystalDiskMark included) fail to accurately measure the 4k random writes due to the short benchmark times so this should be taken in consideration when reading the scores. The Iometer scores did show better 4k random write performance and hence gives credence to Intel’s assertion.

PCMark Vantage 1.0.2.0 – Intel P67 Platform

PCMark Vantage v1.01 measures the performance of the latest PC hardware across a variety of common scenarios. PCMark Vantage supports both system level and component level benchmarking and comprises several different test suites but for the purposes of this review, we stuck with just the HDD suite. The nice thing about PCMark Vantage is that you can submit your scores online and compare against others.

Benchmark Results: Excellent scores all around on this benchmark with all of the scores near the best in all categories although ironically, the Intel X25-M leads the way.