It's been quite a suprise that Intel chose to release a Solid State Drive based on a SandForce SF-2281 controller. Meanwhile the chip giant has an entire line-up of SandForce based SSD. Today for review we have the 240 Gigabyte model that uses synchronous NAND flash an promises blistering fast performance.

Specifications / Delivery

Model	Intel SSD 520 Series 240 Gigabyte
Capacity	240 Gigabyte
Memory	Synchronous NAND Flash
Technology	Intel 29 F16B08CCME2
Throughput	up to 550 MB/s reading, up to 490 MB/s writing
Accesstime (read)	< 0.1 ms
Acoustics	no noise
Warranty	3 Years

Behind the scenes

Basically the SSD 520 Series from Intel is a 240 Gigabyte SSD, which uses a SandForce SF-2281 Controller and synchronous NAND Flash memory from Intel. These have been manufactured using a 25 nanometer process and the individual chips have 29 F16B08CCME2 written on them. This indicates that the memory cells are specified for 5'000 P/E cycles and the memory itself is connected to the controller via ONFi 2.x standard. Furhtermore the chips offer 256 Gigabyte of memory but 16 Gigabyte are being used for overprovisioning purposes.

Delivery

In the deliery you get what you need to setup the drive. There is a CD with software for easy migration, a 3.5 inch adaptor brackets, a SATA cable as well as a power adaptor. Altogether there really is everything you need.

Page 1 - Introduction / Specs	Page 7 - Random read KByte/s
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 8 - Sequential write ops
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 9 - Sequential read ops
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 10 - Random write ops
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 11 - Random read ops
Page 6 - Random write KByte/s	Page 12 - Conclusion

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