128 KB Sequential Read Performance

All of the drives we're testing reach above 500 MB/s, and most peak with two outstanding commands. The SSD 525 and m4 scale more gradually up to their peak at a queue depth of 16. Samsung's 840 Pro is ninja-quick. But in everyday use, you're going to have a hard time telling between these drives in this particular workload.
128 KB Sequential Write Performance

The 240 GB SSD 525 is only able to hang with the heavy hitters when we test with easily compressible data to punch up above 500 MB/s. It isn't likely that most folks will encounter vast quantities of repeating data written sequentially, though. Unless you're writing from one SSD to another, these performance numbers become progressively less useful.
The SSD 525 does perform surprisingly well with random data, managing a swift 324 MB/s. By comparison, Crucial's m4 tops out near 280 MB/s. Samsung's 120 and 250 GB 840's TLC NAND yields a tepid 120 and 250 MB/s, respectively.
- 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.