Intel SSD 330 Review: 60, 120, And 180 GB Models Benchmarked
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Page 1:Intel SSD 330: SandForce At A Lower Price
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Page 2:Inside The SSD 330: A Binned 520?
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Page 3:Test Setup And Benchmarks
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Page 4:Benchmark Results: 4 KB Random Performance
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Page 5:Benchmark Results: 128 KB Sequential Performance
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Page 6:Benchmark Results: Incompressible Performance
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Page 7:Benchmark Results: Storage Suite v1.0 And PCMark 7
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Page 8:Power Consumption
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Page 9:Intel SSD 330: Searching For A Segment To Satisfy
Inside The SSD 330: A Binned 520?
Intel's SSD 330 ships in a true 9.5 mm-tall form-factor. That's different from previous Intel drives that used a 2.5 mm shim on a 7 mm enclosure to achieve that 9.5 mm z-height.
Opening the drive up reveals SandForce's familiar SF-2281 controller, as expected. The on-board flash memory gave us more of a surprise, though.
Interestingly, the SSD 330 uses 64 Gb 25 nm synchronous NAND. Vendors employing SandForce controllers typically offer two line-ups: high-end drives armed with expensive synchronous memory and lower-end models with cheaper asynchronous NAND. But Intel uses the synchronous stuff in its "value-oriented" 330s. That's a nod to performance, for sure.
So, now we know that the SSD 330s feature the same controller and flash as the 520s. That makes the two products essentially the same, right? Well, yes—and no. Close examination of each SSD 330 (we purchased all three drives on Amazon) reveals a sticker labeled "Bin 2." Could Intel simply be sorting its SSDs, separating, configuring, and packaging them based on their tested performance characteristics?
We're not certain if Intel is dropping the frequency of SandForce's controller or simply using a de-tuned firmware to achieve its more conservative specifications. What we can be relatively sure of, though, is that it's filtering out parts in much the same way as it does with CPUs. Unfortunately, Intel would not respond to our requests for comment.
- Intel SSD 330: SandForce At A Lower Price
- Inside The SSD 330: A Binned 520?
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: 4 KB Random Performance
- Benchmark Results: 128 KB Sequential Performance
- Benchmark Results: Incompressible Performance
- Benchmark Results: Storage Suite v1.0 And PCMark 7
- Power Consumption
- Intel SSD 330: Searching For A Segment To Satisfy
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147164
now its $275 or $1.074/GB. Better price/stability/performance than those listed above.
Crucial m4 128GB from Newegg and Amazon @ 124.99. That is less than $1/GB.
On that note, why weren't the Vertex 4s included in this review with the other drives?
I don't think that it makes much difference at SATA 3Gb/s, but the 330s are faster drives, so they might be marginally better.
Probably at least not until a cheaper memory than Flash is used in SSDs, so maybe ten to twenty years, if we're lucky.
Whether or not a part that is faster for your workloads than others and is faster enough to make a difference depends on what you are doing. If I was doing a lot of storage heavy stuff, like constantly downloading and decompressing large archives, then an SSD that can deal with in-compressible data very well would provide very noticeable gains over any SandForce drive or any lower end non-Sandforce drives.
Fair point. Mind you, if you do that much and it's that important hardly any of standard (consumer grade) SSDs would interest you. Unless you are talking of downloading software and games from questionable sites, then yes - cheap and fast is cheerful.
Well, I think that Steam would be a perfectly legal example for this. I also happen to play around with many OSs in VMs, so I'm often downloading each new version of many different Linux distributions and other operating systems (such as React OS and Haiku). I also download and test out a lot of freeware and some of them can get pretty big.
Good point. What SSD do you use if you don't mind me asking? And how long have you been using it? Any issues? I had Intel 320 80GB but that was just for few months. Getting SSD 330 120GB now, not sure how it will perform but anything that is faster than RAID 0 HDD and is quiet would be better in my book. Never mind the storage amount.
I have little money to throw around right now. I don't have an SSD yet, by I think I'll grab a Vertex 4 if I can get around to it. For now, RAID 0 hard drives has been the best that I could get. It's not great at all, but it's what I could afford and it could be worse.
One could only wish. I'm waiting for HDD prices to come down to HDD level!.
It won't be nearly as distinct of a difference. Unless you do work that makes fairly small differences in storage performance very obvious, you probably won't notice any difference. The 330s are considerably faster than the 320s, but even the 320s are orders of magnitude faster than HDDs for random accesses and a few times faster than HDDs for sequential throughput. The difference between the 320s and HDDs is far greater than the difference between the 320s and 330s.