Even at small capacities, the SSD 525 is fast. That much isn't in question. When you tack on extras like Intel's superb SSD Toolbox software and IMFT NAND rated at 5,000 P/E cycles, it's clear that the mSATA market is now being serviced by another higher-end option sure to attract fans of Intel's storage solutions.

Indeed, there are a lot of positives favoring the SSD 525. But prospective purchasers may very well be put off by comparatively higher pricing. Just how much is Intel asking for its Lincoln Crest family?
| Model | MSRP | Street | Approximate Usable GB | Street Price / Usable GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SSD 525 30 GB | $54 | $60 | 28 GB | $2.14 |
| SSD 525 60 GB | $104 | $110 | 56 GB | $1.96 |
| SSD 525 120 GB | $149 | $170 | 111 GB | $1.53 |
| SSD 525 180 GB | $214 | $230 | 167 GB | $1.37 |
| SSD 525 240 GB | $279 | $290 | 223 GB | $1.30 |
Once you get up into higher capacities, the premium isn't huge. But the 30 GB model exceeds $2/GB, which seems a bit expensive. Perhaps if you plan to use it for a caching drive, $53 isn't so bad. If Intel was really worried about pricing, it might have launched an SSD 330-esque mSATA-based drive for its first foray into 6 Gb/s territory. The company seems to be quite content charging more for its 500-series performance-oriented client drives, and the SSD 525 keeps that trend going.
Just remember that this time last year, a 240 GB SSD 520 was pushing $600. Of course, Crucial's 256 GB mSATA-based m4 has been spotted around $.80/GB, which is why we've been so bullish on it. Deals like that make it hard to argue for spending more on the SSD 525. At least you still get the benefit of a five-year warranty for every model except the 30 GB version (it gets stuck with the highest price/GB and a two-year shorter warranty; not very attractive caveats).
The SSD 525 family does enjoy 128-bit AES encryption, though, along with enterprise-class 1016 uncorrectable bit error rates, end-to-end data protection, and revised LLKi firmware. Also featured on the drives is thermal monitoring and protection, set to trip at 70 degrees Celsius if things get too warm. Moreover, Intel forgoes SandForce's RAISE cross-die redundancy feature, preferring instead to rely on binned flash and extra over-provisioning for longevity. Rather than devoting an extra die worth of NAND to parity, that space is used for OP. The 30 GB model has 11% OP; the other models run closer to 14%.

All told, Lincoln Crest doesn't offer anything new in terms of innovation or performance. But the mSATA form factor has been an afterthought for most manufacturers, and until recently there were many who hadn't yet introduced compatible products. Any maybe for good reason. Looming over the discussion of shrinking form factors is Intel's Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF) standard, which promises to roll back the 6 Gb/s ceiling currently dogging newer drives. It's hard to say where things are heading, but mSATA will almost certainly continue to flourish in the near term.
Intel deserves much of the credit for getting solid-state storage into desktops and laptops. Without the company's push into storage five years ago, it's hard to say where things would stand. In hindsight, Intel probably did everyone a favor by establishing itself as a purveyor of fast, dependable SSDs, simultaneously driving prices down and increasing acceptance of what was considered a new technology. Before then, SSDs were not particularly awesome. In many cases, they were even inferior to conventional storage. But Intel did its part to push the industry past those early beginnings. With Lincoln Crest, Intel breaks new ground...just not much of it.
- 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.