Intel SSD 510-Series 250 GB Review: Adopting 6 Gb/s SATA

Benchmark Results: 4 KB And 512 KB Random Writes

The SSD 510’s random write performance is actually a little higher here than we would have expected given Intel’s “up to 8.6K” spec. But that’s only good enough to end up in second-to-last place.

Interestingly, the X25-M again chokes at queue depths in excess of eight.

Meanwhile, the Vertex 3s have tiger blood and Adonis DNA, both exceeding 50 000 IOPS.

Low queue depths are not necessarily ideal for SSDs, which depend on many, many pending requests in order to saturate their parallelized architectures. In that context, the SSD 510-series doesn’t necessarily get clobbered, and in fact it beats the X25-M. At the same time, losing to a whole host of shipping SSDs isn’t particularly impressive, either.

Ramp up to more aggressive queue depths, representing very I/O-heavy workloads, and the situation deteriorates rapidly. The SSD 510 actually sacrifices some performance, while the X25-M gains a bit. The Vertex 3s and RealSSD C300 are much better set up to scale with queue depth, and we see significant gains from those drives.

Talk about a turnaround. Intel very clearly optimized this drive for moving larger files. Though it struggles feebly with 4 KB transfers, 512 KB transfers excel, and the SSD 510 turns a last-place finish into a first-place finish, even trumping the Vertex 3 drives.