Intel SSD 525 Review: Five mSATA Drives, From 30 To 240 GB

Impressive! but don't think i am wealthy enough to buy those

It is REALLY unfair to reduce the performance of smaller GB drives!

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.
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 ;-)

slomo4shoThe 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.
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.

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.

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.
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.