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

ATTO & AS-SSD Benchmarks

ATTO v2.41

ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant in the SSD world. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes with the total length being 256mb.

ATTO – Intel P67 Platform (Single Drive)

ATTO – Intel P67 Platform (RAID 0)

Benchmark Results: In the single drive configuration, the Intel 520 Series puts up numbers very much like we would come to expect on a SandForce 2281 drive. In RAID 0, it kicks ass as you would expect it to with scores that are roughly double that of the single drive although trailing what we saw with the RevoDrive 3 X2.

This test employs compressible data showing the best case scenario in terms of data throughput for the SandForce drives. Let’s have a look at a few others that use incompressible data to see how that impacts the scores.

AS-SSD (1.6.4237.30508) Benchmark – Intel P67 Platform

We have been running the AS-SSD Benchmark app for over some time now and found that it gives a broad result set. The programmer has worked very hard on this software and continues to make updates often so if you use it, show him some love and send him a donation (we did!). There are now three tests that are found within the tool and we’ll show the results from all of them.

Single Drive Configuration:

RAID 0 Configuration:

Benchmark Results: The results here are somewhat typical for a SandForce drive with diminished scores, especially on the writes. However, the scores didn’t drop as much as we have seen for similar drives but it doesn’t really clearly stand out either even though it took the top overall score for a single drive. On RAID 0, the read scores were still banging and the writes were in the area of the scores we’d see for a single drive on the ATTO benchmark with compressible data.

Benchmark Results: In this graph, the flatter (and higher) the lines, the more consistent performance. Reads are always flat but writes can vary widely. The Intel 520 drive shows a relatively shallow slope, starting fairly high on the graph which bodes positively for well-rounded performance.