Testing mSATA drives alongside 2.5" models poses a few issues. There are plenty of desktop motherboards with mSATA slots, but for continuity of testing, we have to use the platform you've seen in our stories for months. To that end, Intel smartly armed us with its Dale Crest mSATA Adapter to facilitate our benchmarking endeavors.
mSATA-based drives are powered using 3.3 V DC. SATA drives are predominantly powered via 5 V DC (and sometimes 12 V). The adapter allows our samples to connect like any other SATA drive, but could result in slightly skewed power numbers in the conversion process. Intel's mSATA adapters aren't publicly available, though a cursory search turns up several Asian-sourced units of varying quality and price. If nothing else, Intel's Dale Crest mSATA adapter is a fetching shade of blue.

| Test Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core i5-2400 (Sandy Bridge), 32 nm, 3.1 GHz, LGA 1155, 6 MB Shared L3, Turbo Boost Enabled |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte G1.Sniper M3 |
| Memory | G.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 |
| Tested Drives | 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 320 300 GB SATA 3Gb/s, Firmware: 1.92 | |
| Intel SSD 320 80 GB SATA 3Gb/s, Firmware: 1.92 | |
| Intel SSD 330 180 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 300i | |
| Intel SSD 330 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 300i | |
| Samsung 830 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: CXMO | |
| Samsung 830 64 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: CXMO | |
| Crucial m4 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 0309 | |
| Crucial m4 64 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 0009 | |
| OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.15 | |
| OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.22 | |
| OCZ Vertex 3 60 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.15 | |
| OCZ Agility 3 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.22 | |
| OCZ Agility 3 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.22 | |
| OCZ Agility 3 60 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.22 | |
| OCZ Vertex 4 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 1.5 | |
| OCZ Agility 4 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 1.5 | |
| OCZ Agility 4 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 1.5 | |
| OCZ Vertex 4 64 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 1.5 | |
| Samsung 840 Pro 512 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: DMX02B0Q | |
| Corsair Neutron GTX 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: M206 | |
| Graphics | MSI Cyclone GTX 460 1024 MB |
| Power Supply | Seasonic X-650, 650 W 80 PLUS Gold |
| 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 |
| Benchmarks | |
|---|---|
| Tom's Hardware Storage Bench v1.0 | Trace-Based |
| IOmeter 1.1.0 | # Workers = 1, 4 KB Random: LBA=8 GB, varying QDs, 128 KB Sequential, 8 GB LBA Precondition, Exponential QD Scaling |
| PCMark 7 | Secondary Storage Suite |
- Intel SSD 525: Intel Goes 6 Gb/s With mSATA
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Results: 128 KB Sequential Performance
- Results: 4 KB Random Performance
- Results: Comparative 4 KB Random Performance
- Results: Comparative 128 KB Seqential Performance
- Results: Storage Suite v1.0, PCMark 7, And Write Testing
- Power Consumption
- SSD 525 Is Pretty Pricey, But Also Powerful
Interesting, if some benches weren't Intel only, but all included the relavent competitors.
This is not something manufacturers do to just to p*ss off users who buy the smaller capacities.
A small drive has fewer memory chips than a large drive. The controller has then fewer chips to efficiently spread the data to... and this leads to decreased performances. There's nothing immoral to that.
It's not the same story like for example, a couple of years ago, Yamaha selling a 2x CD writer and a 4x CD writer at double the price ... and by removing one resistance, your 2x writer became a 4x model ;-)
evaluating price per performance as it is frequently offered at around $.60 or less per GB.
It's a surprisingly good drive, and performs very well on boards that only have SATA2.
I recently upgraded my brother's P55 system with an 840 250GB; the main game he
plays atm now loads in just a few seconds, instead of the more than 3 minutes it took
with the old mechanical disk (and that wasn't exactly a low-end drive either - a WD VR
150GB 10K SATA). He is, as one might expect, very happy indeed.
In addition, I bought him an internal Startech storage unit that holds 4 x 2.5" devices
(it takes up one 5.25" bay) and a couple of 2.5" drives (1TB for general data, 2nd-hand
250GB for backup of the 840). He bought another 1TB for backup, so the Startech now
holds the 840, two 1TB and the 250GB. The end results looks rather good, and the
performance with the 840 is excellent (I bought one for my 3930K setup).
I have a lot of OCZ drives (more than 40, various models); what impresses me the most
about the 840 is the way it maintains top performance even after being hammered with
an 80GB full clone from an old disk, lots of Windows and driver updates, game installs, etc.
Testing with HDTach, AS-SSD, etc. show performance almost identical to an original clean
state. None of my OCZ drives behave this way - the HDTach graph shows significant
variance, while the 840 graph is smooth across the range. Beats me how Samsung has
achieved this, but I like it.
Modern SSDs may be saturating the SATA3 interface, but they bring an amazing new lease
of life to older SATA2 systems.
Ian.
I have an ASRock Z77E-ITX back from RMA that I haven't yet put back into service that has a mSATA slot on its underside. It can be used to build a very small system. That these slots are only 3Gb/s hardly matters when comparing them to the speed of a mechanical HDD.
You are confusing msata with mini pcie. A drive is a drive is a drive, sata is sata is sata. Connect any msata drive to an actual msata port (not mini pcie which has the same connector) and it can become your C drive. No one is forcing you to use Intel SRT\RST to use an msata drive as cache.
If you purchased a 2.5" ssd and now feel your msata port is useless thats on you. If you had purchased an msata drive you could have used a 1tb in that 2.5" bay instead.
to add some clarification: the confusion stems from some laptops using a mPCI-Express as a multipurpose slot allowing either mPCI-Express or mSATA cards. while i have not seen this on desktop motherboards, maybe ddpruitt's experience comes from spotty documentation from laptop makers on whether their combo port supports mSATA? otherwise, you are very correct that the mSATA should appear to the system as any other SATA drive and be usable as such.