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Intel SSD 530 Review: A Revised Controller And 20 nm Flash
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1. Putting Intel's 180 GB SSD 530 To The Test

Intel's decision to move away from its own proprietary SSD controller on the desktop was met with simultaneous excitement and trepidation from enthusiasts. After all, the company's reputation in the storage space was earned with products like the X25-M and X25-E (historically awesome drives, if ever there were any). As the era of 6 Gb/s SATA storage was ushered in by SSDs like Crucial's C300, and hit full stride with controllers from SandForce, it became clear that Intel didn't plan to drop an updated processor to enable the faster interface's peak potential, as it had for SATA 3Gb/s.

After a short-lived stint with Marvell's sweet 88SS9174 controller in its SSD 510 series, Intel flipped the script and ran into SandForce's waiting arms. The first fruit of that admittedly unexpected union, code-named Cherryville, became the SSD 520. And that's pretty much where the story ends.

With Cherryville anchoring the Non Volatile Memory group's desktop-oriented offerings, the next few product introductions were hardly unexpected. After the SSD 520, Intel released its SSD 330, which employed the same basic formula with lower-binned flash and a correspondingly more affordable price tag. Then, the company took its SSD 330, swapped in 20 nm flash in place of its 25 nm NAND, and launched the SSD 335. Throughout, Intel's SSD 520 remained a premium product, priced to reflect that fact. Its SSD 330 and 335 were comparable performers, but with three-year warranties instead of five-year coverage.

Surprisingly, the SSD 525 wasn't the revamped 520 we might have expected. Rather, it was an SSD 520 shrunk to fit the mSATA form factor, armed with new capacity points, and flashed to the latest firmware.

The real SSD 520 successor recently became available in the SSD 530. And unlike the previous generation, Intel's new model number includes 2.5", mSATA, and the M.2 form factor. All told, there are 14 new products sporting SSD 530 naming.

Intel SSD 530
Capacity
Form Factor
Sequential Read/WriteRandom 4 KB Read/Write
80 GB
2.5", 7 mm
540 MB/s / 480 MB/s
24,000 / 80,000 IOPS
120 GB
2.5", 7 mm540 MB/s / 480 MB/s24,000 / 80,000 IOPS
180 GB
2.5", 7 mm540 MB/s / 490 MB/s41,000 / 80,000 IOPS
240 GB
2.5", 7 mm540 MB/s / 490 MB/s41,000 / 80,000 IOPS
360 GB
2.5", 7 mm540 MB/s / 490 MB/s45,000 / 80,000 IOPS
480 GB
2.5", 7 mm540 MB/s / 490 MB/s48,000 / 80,000 IOPS
80 GB
mSATA
540 MB/s / 480 MB/s24,000 / 80,000 IOPS
120 GB
mSATA540 MB/s / 480 MB/s24,000 / 80,000 IOPS
180 GB
mSATA540 MB/s / 490 MB/s41,000 / 80,000 IOPS
240 GB
mSATA540 MB/s / 490 MB/s41,000 / 80,000 IOPS
80 GB
M.2 2280
540 MB/s / 480 MB/s24,000 / 80,000 IOPS
120 GB
M.2 2280540 MB/s / 480 MB/s24,000 / 80,000 IOPS
180 GB
M.2 2280540 MB/s / 490 MB/s41,000 / 80,000 IOPS
360 GB
M.2 2280540 MB/s / 490 MB/s41,000 / 80,000 IOPS

That's a lot of new storage hardware, right? There are six SATA drives, four mSATA models, and four M.2-based offerings. It's unclear whether the forthcoming mSATA-based drives will supplant the SSD 525 series altogether, but that mSATA-only family is made up of six products. The 30 and 60 GB SSD 525s don't have an SSD 530 equivalent, so their futures could be tenuous.

By the end of today, we want to know whether the SSD 530 is an SSD 520 with 20 nm flash or something more. The answer isn't as simple as our question though, so let's dig in.

Intel SSD 530: Under The Hood

Getting to the SSD 530's insides isn't particularly difficult. Disappointingly, it does require marring the super-fresh sticker, which hides the last screw. Consider it the most attractive warranty seal we've ever seen. With security trappings out of the way, the 180 GB model's PCB is held in place by hope and the drive controller's thermal pad.

Given 180 GB of capacity, we were already expecting six or 12 NAND emplacements, which is exactly how Intel configures this drive. We find 12 packages labeled 29F16B08CCMF2, each packing two 64 Gb dies manufactured at 20 nm. The C (fifth character from the end of the part code) represents dual die packages, whilst the F (next from last alphanumeric) translates to 20 nm. Simple, right?

When I first learned that Intel was designing its mSATA-based SSD 525, I was sure that it would use the revised B02 SandForce controller. It didn't, though. And yet Intel still managed to deliver good power consumption figures. I was even more confident that the SSD 530s would employ the updated processor, and this time I was right (in a manner of speaking).

At least technically, this isn't a SandForce-branded processor. Neither Intel nor LSI would comment on the record, but officially, this is an Intel BF29A41BB0 controller. Underneath all of that fancy cladding is mostly a SandForce 2281 B02-stepping storage processor. The LSI branding underneath Intel's part number indicates that this really is LSI technology, fabbed by TSMC in Taiwan. As for unique tweaks that may exist, nobody is talking. So, I'm not going to call it an Intel BF29AS41BB0 when it's most easily recognizable as a SandForce controller.

There are some new features, though performance falls in line with what you'd expect (assuming you were expecting numbers similar to every other drive with a SandForce controller). The new stepping really emphasizes power consumption, adding not only support for the DevSleep initiative on supported platforms, but incorporating lower active idle power use, too. Otherwise, the most influential capabilities are reserved for SandForce's next-gen controller.

That's the long and short of it. Intel's SSD 530 is predominantly a 520 with updated bits and pieces, and therefore two other drives spring to mind as we look around the lab for hardware to test against: the original SSD 520 and the mSATA-based SSD 525, both also at 180 GB.

2. Inside The Box, Test Setup, And Benchmarks

We got our hands on a retail drive, complete with Intel's desktop installation kit. Because this is a 7 mm-tall SSD, the company includes a black plastic spacer to hit a 9.5 mm Z-height. You also get an obligatory sticker, a 3.5" adapter sled, a power adapter, and a black SATA cable. Sifting around the pile a little more, you'll also notice a 3" optical disc with instructions, a quick-start guide, and random mounting hardware.

The boxed drive includes a five-year warranty. OEM models often sell for less, but pay close attention to the guarantee coverage. Everything we found on Newegg includes five years of protection, but it's not unheard of for OEM offerings to pare back on warranty.

Test Hardware
ProcessorIntel Core i5-2400 (Sandy Bridge), 32 nm, 3.1 GHz, LGA 1155, 6 MB Shared L3, Turbo Boost Enabled
MotherboardGigabyte G1.Sniper M3
MemoryG.Skill Ripjaws 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3-1866 @ DDR3-1333, 1.5 V
System Drive Kingston HyperX 3K 240 GB, Firmware 5.02
Drive(s) Under Test
Intel SSD 530 180 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: DC12
Comparison DrivesIntel SSD 520 180 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 400i

Intel SSD 525 180 GB mSATA, Firmware: LLKi

SanDisk A110 256 GB M.2 PCIe x2, Firmware: A200100

Silicon Motion SM226EN 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: M0709A

Crucial M500 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02

Crucial M500 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02

Crucial M500 480 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02

Crucial M500 960 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02

Samsung 840 EVO 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q

Samsung 840 EVO 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q

Samsung 840 EVO 480 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q

Samsung 840 EVO 1 TB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q

SanDisk Ultra Plus 64 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: X211200

SanDisk Ultra Plus 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware X211200

SanDisk Ultra Plus 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware X211200

Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware DXM04B0Q

Samsung 840 Pro 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware DXM04B0Q

SanDisk Extreme II 120 GB, Firmware: R1311

SanDisk Extreme II 240 GB, Firmware: R1311

SanDisk Extreme II 480 GB, Firmware: R1311

Seagate 600 SSD 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: B660

Intel SSD 525 30 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi

Intel SSD 525 60 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi

Intel SSD 525 120 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi

Intel SSD 525 180 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi

Intel SSD 525 240 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi

Intel SSD 335 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 335s

Intel SSD 510 250 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: PWG2

OCZ Vertex 3.20 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.25

OCZ Vector 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.0

Samsung 830 512 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: CXMO3B1Q

Crucial m4 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 000F

Plextor M5 Pro 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 1.02

 Corsair Neutron GTX 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: M206
Graphics
MSI Cyclone GTX 460 1 GB
Power Supply
Seasonic X-650, 650 W 80 PLUS Gold
Chassis
Lian Li Pitstop
RAID
LSI 9266-8i PCIe x8, FastPath and CacheCade AFK
System Software and Drivers
Operating
System
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate
DirectX
DirectX 11
Drivers
Graphics: Nvidia 314.07
RST: 10.6.1002
IMEI: 7.1.21.1124
Generic AHCI: MSAHCI.SYS
Benchmarks
Tom's Hardware Storage Bench v1.0
Trace-Based 
Iometer 1.1.0# Workers = 1, 4 KB Random: LBA=16 GB, varying QDs, 128 KB Sequential, 8 GB LBA Precondition, Exponential QD Scaling
PCMark 7
Secondary Storage Suite
PCM Vantage
Storage Suite
3. Results: 128 KB Sequential Performance

Fantastic sequential read and write performance is a trademark of modern SSDs. To measure it, we use incompressible data over a 16 GB LBA space, then test at queue depths from one to 16. We're reporting these numbers in binary (where 1 KB equals 1024) instead of decimal numbers (where 1 KB is 1000 bytes). When necessary, we're also limiting the scale of the chart to enhance readability.

128 KB Sequential Read

The SSD 530, 525, and 520 are very similar, despite different firmware, form factors (in the case of the SSD 525), and flash (in the case of the SSD 530).

We test the three Intel drives using easily compressible repeating data and difficult-to-compress random payloads. Immediately, it's easy to distinguish one workload from the other in our chart.

Subjected to repeating data, the three SandForce drives crest 500 MB/s in sequential reads. With incompressible data, that number falls a bit short. The SSD 530 takes a slightly larger hit, maxing out closer to 400 MB/s than 500.

Bottom line: as we've come to expect over the years, SandForce-controlled drives don't suffer much during reads when the data patterns tend to be incompressible. That "honor", if you want to call it that, is reserved for writes.

128 KB Sequential Write

Take just one guess. Which cluster represents incompressible data patterns, and which one is characterized by repeating data?

The SSD 530, 525, and 520 all take fairly large hits writing incompressible data, though this shouldn't be news by now. You'll see a ceiling of about 250 MB/s in our Iometer testing, in the same range as any other SSD based on second-gen SandForce hardware and ONFi-compatible flash. Given 180 GB of capacity, these drives fall between where 120 and 240 GB repositories would land.

Of course, when it comes to manufacturer specs, you're only going to see those ambitious compressible data results since they look so much better.

Here's a break-down of the maximum observed 128 KB sequential read and write performance with Iometer:

The SSD 520, 525, and 530 are each represented here by their compressible and incompressible transfer results. Intel's SSD 530 appears amongst rarefied company when it's fed repeating data, showing up between SanDisk's über Extreme II 480 GB and the 1000 GB 840 EVO.

Change the data's entropy, however, and the SSD 530 doesn't do as well. In the chart above, I have its benchmark numbers with incompressible data in yellow. That's a pretty significant drop. To be fair, the SSD 530 still places well. It isn't too far off from Crucial's M500 at 240 GB, and it turns in better numbers than the M500 at 120 GB.

4. Results: 4 KB Random Performance

We turn to Iometer as our synthetic metric of choice for testing 4 KB random performance. Technically, "random" translates to a consecutive access that occurs more than one sector away. On a mechanical hard disk, this can lead to significant latencies that hammer performance. Spinning media simply handles sequential accesses much better than random ones, since the heads don't have to be physically repositioned. With SSDs, the random/sequential access distinction is much less relevant. Data are put wherever the controller wants it, so the idea that the operating system sees one piece of information next to another is mostly just an illusion.

4 KB Random Reads

Testing the performance of SSDs often emphasizes 4 KB random reads, and for good reason. Most system accesses are both small and random. Moreover, read performance is arguably more important than writes when you're talking about typical client workloads.

There is more variability between the three 180 GB SSDs from Intel than you might have expected. Across our 16 GB active test range, the SSD 530 achieves about 45,000 IOPS with compressible data. Roughly 35,000 4 KB IOPS is the best we can hope for testing incompressible data. Intel says its SSD 530 is good for 41,000 4 KB read IOPS at a queue depth of 32. We beat that number using compressible information, but don't quite get there pushing random payloads.

Interestingly, note that the diminutive SSD 525 beats the rest of the field.

4 KB Random Writes

Random write performance is also exceptionally important. Early SSDs didn't do well in this discipline, seizing up even in light workloads. Newer SSDs wield more than 100x the performance of drives from 2007, but there's a point of diminishing returns in desktop environments.

When you swap a hard drive out for solid-state storage, your experience improves. Load times, boot times, and system responsiveness all get better. When it's called upon, your SSD can handle a lot more I/O than the spinning media you had in there before. When it comes to typical client workloads however, getting to those operations faster is what matters, not necessarily trying to juggle more of them.

Intel's SSD 520 replacement delivers the 80,000 IOPS it's rated for, but only when we send compressible data down its channels. Repeating information is supremely easy for SandForce's real time data deduplication technology to manage, which is why we see the higher numbers. With random data coming out of the buffer, the SSD 530 goes so far as to surpass our expectations with 55,000 IOPS.

Here's a break-down of the maximum observed 4 KB sequential read and write performance with Iometer:

The order the drives appear in our chart is determined by maximum combined read and write performance.

The 180 GB SSD 530 posts respectable numbers, even if they don't top our chart. Isolating repeating data, the SSD 530 places under the 120 GB SanDisk Extreme II and 128 GB Silicon Motion SM226EN. It even slots in under the older SSD 520 and 525. Testing with random data, it finishes just ahead of Intel's Marvell-powered SSD 510. That means it's even behind SanDisk's Ultra Plus 64 GB.

5. Results: Tom's Hardware Storage Bench

Storage Bench v1.0 (Background Info)

Our Storage Bench incorporates all of the I/O from a trace recorded over two weeks. The process of replaying this sequence to capture performance gives us a bunch of numbers that aren't really intuitive at first glance. Most idle time gets expunged, leaving only the time that each benchmarked drive was actually busy working on host commands. So, by taking the ratio of that busy time and the the amount of data exchanged during the trace, we arrive at an average data rate (in MB/s) metric we can use to compare drives.

It's not quite a perfect system. The original trace captures the TRIM command in transit, but since the trace is played on a drive without a file system, TRIM wouldn't work even if it were sent during the trace replay (which, sadly, it isn't). Still, trace testing is a great way to capture periods of actual storage activity, a great companion to synthetic testing like Iometer.

Incompressible Data and Storage Bench v1.0

Also worth noting is the fact that our trace testing pushes incompressible data through the system's buffers to the drive getting benchmarked. So, when the trace replay plays back write activity, it's writing largely incompressible data. If we run our storage bench on a SandForce-based SSD, we can monitor the SMART attributes for a bit more insight.

Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 120 GB
SMART Attributes
RAW Value Increase
#242 Host Reads (in GB)
84 GB
#241 Host Writes (in GB)
142 GB
#233 Compressed NAND Writes (in GB)
149 GB

Host reads are greatly outstripped by host writes to be sure. That's all baked into the trace. But with SandForce's inline deduplication/compression, you'd expect that the amount of information written to flash would be less than the host writes (unless the data is mostly incompressible, of course). For every 1 GB the host asked to be written, Mushkin's drive is forced to write 1.05 GB.

If our trace replay was just writing easy-to-compress zeros out of the buffer, we'd see writes to NAND as a fraction of host writes. This puts the tested drives on a more equal footing, regardless of the controller's ability to compress data on the fly.

Average Data Rate

The Storage Bench trace generates more than 140 GB worth of writes during testing. Obviously, this tends to penalize drives smaller than 180 GB and reward those with more than 256 GB of capacity.

It's a good thing that telling the difference between two SSDs in a desktop machine is so difficult. Intel's SSD 530 ponies up a 140 MB/s result, while the mSATA-based SSD 525 and previous-gen 520 fall within 1% of each other. Where do those roughly 60 MB/s of performance go? We'll do our best to explain on the next page.

6. Results: Tom's Hardware Storage Bench, Continued

Service Times

Beyond the average data rate reported on the previous page, there's even more information we can collect from Tom's Hardware's Storage Bench. For instance, mean (average) service times show what responsiveness is like on an average I/O during the trace.

It would be difficult to graph the 10+ million I/Os that make up our test, so looking at the average time to service an I/O makes more sense. For a more nuanced idea of what's transpiring during the trace, we plot mean service times for reads against writes. That way, drives with better latency show up closer to the origin; lower numbers are better.

Write latency is simply the total time it takes an input or output operation to be issued by the host operating system, travel to the storage subsystem, commit to the storage device, and have the drive acknowledge the operation. Read latency is similar. The operating system asks the storage device for data stored in a certain location, the SSD reads that information, and then it's sent to the host. Modern computers are fast and SSDs are zippy, but there's still a significant amount of latency involved in a storage transaction.

See the SSD 520 and 525, nestled closed to one another? Notice the SSD 530, off on its own? What gives? Are the average data rate and mean service time plots related somehow?

They're not, really. And that's largely because of the way in which average data rate accrues, based on busy time. As a result, this figure is most heavily weighted towards activity at low queue depths, and not necessarily the most taxing accesses. If a given system isn't being otherwise utilized, does it really matter how fast your SSD is? Not as much, no. But if you mix in more demanding tasks, it's a lot easier to distinguish between faster and slower drives.

The SSD 530 incurs a roughly 7% penalty compared to the SSD 520 and 525. Is this attributable to the newer drive's 20 nm flash? It's hard to say for certain. Look at the SSD 335 and Vertex 3.20. Both rock 240 GB of NAND that's very similar, and neither is as fast as the Silicon Motion 128 GB reference platform. They do, however, best Crucial's M500 and venerable m4, though.

The SSD 520 and 525 again match each other, with the SSD 530 a bit behind them. Given where the modern 120 GB 840 EVO and M500 finish, Intel's SSD 530 is still a serious contender at 180 GB, though.

7. Results: PCMark Vantage And PCMark 7

Futuremark's PCMark 7: Secondary Storage Suite

PCMark 7 uses the same trace-based technology as our Storage Bench v1.0 for its storage suite testing. It employs a geometric mean scoring system to generate a composite, so we end up with PCMarks instead of a megabytes per second. One-thousand points separate the top and bottom, but that encompasses a far larger difference than the score alone indicates.

This test is a big improvement over the older PCMark Vantage, at least for SSD benchmarking. The storage suite is comprised of several small traces. At the end, the geometric mean of those scores is scaled with a number representing the test system's speed. The scores generated are much different from PCMark Vantage, and many manufacturers are predisposed to dislike it for that reason. It's hard to figure out how PCMark 7 "works" because it uses a sliding scale to generate scores. Still, it represents one of the best canned benchmarks for storage, and if nothing else, it helps reinforce the idea that the differences in modern SSD performance don't necessarily amount to a better user experience in average consumer workloads.

In a reversal of the previous page, Intel's SSD 530 outpaces the 520 and 525, though the margin is as slim as can be.

We're including a bit more information in this review. Not only do you get the raw scores in PCMarks, but we also calculate percentages relative to the fastest finisher (in this case, Samsung's 840 Pro 256 GB). The SSD 530 achieves 95.34% of the first-place drive's score, while the SSD 520 and 525 earn 95.27% and 95.14%, respectively. Those are solid outcomes across the board.

Futuremark's PCMark Vantage: Hard Drive Suite

PCMark's Vantage isn't the paragon of SSD testing, mainly because it's old and wasn't designed for the massive performance solid-state technology enables. Intended to exploit the new features in Windows Vista, Vantage was certainly at the forefront of consumer storage benching at the time. Vantage works by taking the geometric mean of composite storage scores and then scaling them a lot like PCMark 7 does. But in Vantage's case, this scaling is achieved by arbitrarily multiplying the geometric sub-score mean by 214.65. That scaling factor is supposed to represent an average test system of the day (a system that's now close to a decade behind the times). PCMark 7 improves on this by creating a unique system-dependent scaling factor and newer trace technology. 

Why bother including this metric, then? A lot of folks prefer Vantage in spite of or because of the cartoonish scores and widespread adoption. That, and the fact that most every manufacturer uses the aged benchmark in box specs and reviewer-specific guidelines. In fairness, Vantage's Hard Drive suite wasn't designed with SSDs in mind, and is actually quite good as pointing out which 5400 RPM mechanical disk might be preferable.

Intel's SSD 510 at 250 GB manages just 45.04% of the SanDisk A110's finish. That makes the trio of more modern 180 GB Intel drives look brilliant by comparison, though the SSD 530 does trail the SSD 520 and 525, based on SandForce's earlier-revision controller.

8. Results: File Copy Performance With Robocopy

Microsoft's Robocopy, a CLI directory replication command, gradually replaced the older xcopy. It's multi-threaded, has a ton of options, and generally outperforms vanilla Windows copy operations. Best of all, it's built right in to Redmond's operating system. Especially useful for network copy operations and backups, Robocopy doesn't stop to ask you one hundred questions while it copies over your music collection, either.

The reality of benchmarking file copy performance is that you need something fast to move data from and fast hardware to move it to. This is most important with SSDs. It doesn't matter if your drive can write sequentially at 500 MB/s if the source files are hosted on a USB 2.0-attached external hard drive. We're copying our test files from an Intel SSD DC S3700 to the drives in the chart below, taking source speed out of the equation (mostly). Moving to faster storage would increase the faster test disks' ultimate file copy performance. It begs the question though -- what is the point? Most users copying data from one source to another (in this case, a SSD) won't have the benefit of copying from a SSD RAID array or PCIe-based solid state storage, so relying on just one SSD as the source gives us the best case average.

There are 9065 files comprising the 16.2 GB payload. Some of the files are huge (up to 2 GB), while others are best described as tiny. On average, that's around 1.8 MB per file. The files are a mix of music, program, pictures, and random file types.

It's fair to say that this chart would look much different if we were copying from a hard drive to a SSD. Even if the disk drive's sequential throughput wasn't a bottleneck, it'd still choke on the smaller files.

The three 180 GB drives from Intel prove themselves consistent in this real-world measure of performance, all achieving 231 MB/s. SandForce's technology works well in part because it scales effectively from drives with four dies all the way up to devices with 64. Intel's SSD 525s are a perfect example of this. Look at the 30, 60, 120, 180, and 240 GB models. Each die count increase yields a substantial speed bump, particularly when it comes to write performance.

9. Results: Power Consumption

Idle Power Consumption

Idle consumption is the most important power metric for consumer and client SSDs. After all, solid-state drives complete host commands quickly, and then drop back down to idle. Aside from the occasional background garbage collection, a modern SSD spends most of its life doing very little. Enterprise-oriented drives are more frequently used at full tilt, making their idle power numbers far less relevant. But this just isn't the case on the desktop, where the demands of client and consumer computing leave most SSDs sitting on their hands for long stretches of time.

Active idle power numbers are critical, especially when it comes to their impact on mobile platforms. Idle means different things on different systems, though. Pretty much every drive we're testing is capable of one or more low-power states, up to and including DevSleep. That last feature is a part of the SATA 3.2 host specification. And while it requires a capable SSD and a compatible platform, enabling it takes power consumption down to a very small number. This is why we test active idle; it's easy to identify, and is still where SSDs spend most of their time.

One of the SSD 530's greatest selling points is lower power consumption at idle, which could have major implications on Haswell-based mobile platforms. SandForce's B02 controller is DevSleep-capable, so if we use a compatible system, it's possible to see deep sleep power consumption well under 1 mW.

Active idle isn't quite the same. Nevertheless, Intel's newer drive with its updated processor fares much better in this metric. The SSD 525 falls in between the miserly SSD 530 and more power-hungry 520.

PCMark 7 Average Power Consumption

If we log power consumption through a workload, even a relatively heavy one, we see that average use is still pretty close to the idle numbers. Max power may spike fiercely, but the usage seen during a PCMark 7 run is pretty light. You can see the drives fall back down to the idle "floor" between peaks of varying intensity.

Intel's three drives are the same size, feature comparable performance, and are close when it comes to power efficiency under load. That makes spotting differences at idle particularly easy. While the SSD 530, 525, and 520 trade blows at the high end, when it comes to logging PCMark 7, the newest model is clearly able to post the best power figures.

As a result, when we chart out averages, the SSD 530 looks most attractive. The SSD 520 and 525 are on roughly equal footing several spots down the hierarchy.

Maximum Observed Power Consumption

It's even better news for Intel that maximum power consumption isn't a critical specification for most desktop workloads. In the enterprise space, yes. This information goes into the calculation for total cost of ownership. But in a client environment, you shouldn't be seeing these numbers for more than short bursts.

When we measure observed consumption, the 20 nm-based SSD 530 splits the SSD 520 and 525, which employ 25 nm NAND.

10. SSD 530 Offers Sassy Looks, Solid Performance, And So-So Pricing

It was only a matter of time before Intel was compelled to ditch the consumer-grade 25 nm flash in its SSD 520 for something more...modern. Economically, it's what makes sense, and likely helps explain why SSD 530s are a bit cheaper than the SSD 520s that came before.

We would have loved to see the next generation of controllers from LSI/SandForce make their debut in Intel's SSD 530 series, but it'll be a few months more before that hotly-anticipated silicon makes its first appearance. Instead, we get the B02 stepping of the company's mature second-gen technology, which is more interesting for its DevSleep support and corrected AES-256 encryption than any effect it has on performance.

This general sentiment carries over to Intel's SSD 530. It's a little slower in some metrics than the drive's predecessors, but there's very little chance of those benchmark numbers being reflected in a real-world client workload. This drive is, for all intents and purposes, an SSD 520 that Intel smartly renames in order to avoid any confusion over its internals. The fact that it sports 20 nm NAND helps palpably with pricing, and we'd expect the SSD 530 to come down more over time.

Right now, it looks like the OEM version of our 180 GB SSD sells for $170, while the retail SKU is priced at $200. You'll need to decide if the boxed version's bundle is worth the extra cash. For most enthusiasts, we'd recommend skipping the boxed 180 GB model and snagging the retail 240 GB drive, which is available at the same $200 price point with all of the same accessories (not to mention a significant speed increase, too). That's $.83/GB on an Intel drive. Plenty of other vendors out there sell for less per gigabyte, but it's rare to see Intel's premium desktop models dipping so low. 

What Happens From Here?

After speaking with a few vendors reliant on SandForce's controllers, it seems that the next-gen processor delay is really hurting. OCZ purchased Indilinx and moved away from its SandForce dependence a while ago, while other vendors branched out with solutions based on alternate silicon. Meanwhile, the big-name vendors making money with SandForce-controlled products have had to watch the competition refresh their line-ups with more modern drives.

Intel could always drop its own celebrated 6 Gb/s controller into upcoming client-oriented SSDs. However, the fact that the company is branding SandForce-based parts with its own label (and possibly folding in enhancements of its own), suggests that it sees promise in what LSI/SandForce is doing. The processor found in Intel's SSD DC S3500 and S3700 isn't particularly well-optimized for low power consumption, so it might not even be the best option in a client environment, particularly when SandForce's technology is already working so well.

Intel's SSD 530 (top) compared to the SSD 520 (bottom)Intel's SSD 530 (top) compared to the SSD 520 (bottom)