Intel SSD 525 Review: Five mSATA Drives, From 30 To 240 GB
Intel has a new family of mSATA-based SSDs powered by SandForce's second-gen controller. Dubbed the SSD 525, we have all five capacities in our lab. Can the promise of strong performance, 5,000 P/E cycles, and a five-year warranty make up for high prices?
Power Consumption
Idle Power Consumption
Idle consumption is the most important power metric for consumer and client SSDs. After all, solid-state drives complete host commands quickly, and then drop back down to idle. Aside from the occasional background garbage collection and house keeping, a modern SSD spends most of its life idling. Enterprise-oriented drives are more frequently used at full tilt, making their idle power numbers less important. But this just isn't the case on the desktop.
We previously established that Samsung's 840s are the king of idle power use, and that continues today. By comparison, Intel's SSD 525s fall to the middle of the pack. Take those numbers with a grain of salt, though: they're almost certainly affected by the mSATA adapter we're using to test.
The big mushy middle of this chart is dominated by SandForce-driven products. The controller company is working diligently on getting idle power down, but the fruits of its labor aren't going to be seen for some time.
It's also worth pointing out that capacity doesn't really affect idle numbers much. Instead, it's almost completely a function of the controller and firmware.
PCMark 7 Average Power
If we measure average power use through a run of PCMark 7, we're able to observe a more taxing workload. These measurements fall far lower than maximum power numbers, despite the benchmark's intensive nature. What does a log of consumption look like?
The peaks and valleys correspond to the individual sub-tests. An average consumer workload might look a lot like this, except the distance from peak to peak would be greater, representing more sporadic use throughout a day.
That helps us explain why the bar chart of average power consumption in PCMark 7 looks so much like the idle power use chart. Despite the myriad spikes during the test, average draw is far closer to idle. Even if a drive is power-hungry under load, the averages don't look so bad. Some of these SSDs might use up to 6 W. But even the worst-looking model we've benchmarked, OCZ's Vertex 4, consumes a reasonable 1.49 W during PCMark 7.
Four of the SSD 525s pull up equally here. Only the 240 GB model falls a bit lower in the finishing order.
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hero1 Nice article. I would like to see more motherboard makers finding a way to include the mSATA slots right on the board like Gigabyte does. I think the ability to have your OS and programs on mSATA and leave the other SSD for games and storage is very welcome. This will be my next hunt, too bad I got rid of my UD5H because it had mSATA slot. I would like to see such feature in the X99/X89 platform.Reply -
slomo4sho The 250 GB Samsung 840 still seems to be the best buy when evaluating price per performance as it is frequently offered at around $.60 or less per GB.Reply -
abbadon_34 damn site changes, no edit.Reply
Interesting, if some benches weren't Intel only, but all included the relavent competitors. -
dthx damianrobertjonesIt is REALLY unfair to reduce the performance of smaller GB drives!This is not something manufacturers do to just to p*ss off users who buy the smaller capacities.Reply
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 ;-) -
mapesdhs slomo4shoThe 250 GB Samsung 840 still seems to be the best buy whenReply
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.
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ddpruitt The vast majority of mSATA systems use the SSD as a cache, and then it's only Intel systems. I would like to see the mSATA ports be more flexible and offered on a larger variety of systems. I'd love to upgrade the mSATA on my laptop but there's no point, I already use an SSD for the main drive. Turning an mSATA into a usable drive on the system is a PITA and just not worth it.Reply -
Onus I have an Asus Maximus Gene V which has a mSATA slot on a little riser card. I am using a 238GB-usable Crucial M4 there as my system drive. It's been working well, so I have no complaints.Reply
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.