Intel 335 Series 180GB SSD Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] Intel should need no introduction when it comes to solid-state drives - after all, it is generally recognized that the company's entry into the SSD market back in 2008 with the X25 series is what catalyzed the SSD movement. The market has changed considerably since then, and similarly so has Intel's SSD offerings. Today, Intel's consumer lineup is comprised entirely of SandForce SF-2281 powered drives. Even so, the company's reputation as one of the most reliable SSD options in the market has not changed, thanks to a full year of validation on its 520 family before launch. It didn't just write its own custom firmware for the SandForce controller, either - even the hardware design was tweaked in its quest to purge errata. The 330 and 335 Series are similar, with the main differences being NAND die size (The 520 gets the best binned NAND, hence the 5 year warranty and price premium to match). Interestingly, one unexpected surprise we noticed was with the power consumption; Intel is claiming to have cut both idle and load power draw by more than half of the 330/520 models - an impressive feat thanks to IMFT's smaller, more efficient 20nm MLC NAND. Intel Consumer SSDs SSD 330 (180GB) SSD 335 (180GB) SSD 520 (180GB) Capacities (GB) 60, 120, 180, 240 180, 240 60, 120, 180, 240, 480 Controller SandForce SF-2281 NAND Intel 25nm MLC Intel 20nm MLC Intel 25nm MLC Sequential Read 500 MB/s 550MB/s Sequential Write 450 MB/s 520 MB/s Max Random Reads 42,000 IOPS 50,000 IOPS Max Random Writes 52,000 IOPS 80,000 IOPS Power (Idle/Load) 600mW / 850mW 275mW / 350mW 600mW / 850mW Warranty 3 Years 5 Years The above table represents the current listing of Intel's SSD products, with the sole exception the 325 Series which uses a different, mSATA connector. Notably, the 335 ships solely with a 9.5mm height form factor, making it a notable exception to the recent trend of 7mm drives. Users looking for 7mm height Intel drives will have to resort to the 520 or 525 Series. The graphic on the front of the drive is still notably absent, although Intel indicates at some future point 335's will be featuring the case redesign. The back of the housing also sports the Intel-typical unfinished manufacturing look that we've seen before on the 520. Thankfully, most of these drives will be looked at once and then squirreled away to not be seen again for a few years. Package contents include the following: quick-start guide, metal 2.5"-to-3.5" plate adapter, speed demon sticker, both sets of mounting screws, molex-to-SATA power adapter and a SATA cable. The latest version of Intel's Toolbox utility can be downloaded from here and here for the in-Windows cloning utility. Intel's Toolbox utility offers pretty much every function the user would want for using the SSD. It provides an estimated life remaining count that shows how much of the expected program / erase cycles have been used, although even then most NAND will have additional cycles well after the 0% mark has been reached. Users can secure erase the SSD, update firmware, check SMART data and even run a sector level check of the entire drive. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate and real-world applicable as possible. We list most of the steps and processes involved in setting up and conducting our benchmarking process below, but in the interests of brevity we can't mention every last detail. If there is any pertinent information that we've inadvertently omitted or you have any thoughts, suggestions, or critiques, then please feel free to email us or post directly in our forums. This site exists for readers like you and we value your input. The table below lists the hardware used in our current storage-testing machine, which remains unchanged throughout all of our testing, with the obvious exception of the storage device. Each drive used for the sake of comparison is also listed here. Techgage Solid-State Drive Test System Processor Intel Core i7-2600 – 3.80GHz (Locked) Quad-Core Motherboard ASUS P8P67 Deluxe Memory 4GB Kingston DDR3-2133 Graphics AMD Radeon HD 5770 Storage Hitachi 7200RPM 2TB Hard DriveCorsair Neutron GTX 240GBCrucial m4 256GBIntel 335 Series 180GBKingston HyperX 3K 240GBKingston SSDNow V300 240GBOCZ Vector 256GBOCZ Vertex 4 256GB Power Supply Antec NeoHE 550W Cooling Noctua DH-14 Et cetera Dell 2407WFP (1920x1200)Lite-on DVD-RWWindows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit Our Windows 7 Desktop for SSD Testing When preparing our SSD testbed for benchmarking we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines The Core i7-2600 processor is turbo-locked at 3.5GHz for result consistency. No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's EFI. AHCI is enabled in the motherboard's EFI for best performance. Only the Intel 6Gb/s port controller is used for test drives. Only cold boots are utilized; for the purposes of our testing a boot is defined as the moment the power button is depressed to the moment the last systray icon and program has fully loaded after reaching the Windows 7 desktop. Auto-login is enabled. Windows 7 Optimizations User Account Control (UAC) is disabled. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Windows Update and OS power-saving settings are disabled. For our new Sandy Bridge storage testbed we have migrated to using test images for our drives. All drives are imaged with the cloned test image to ensure all drivers, programs, and settings remain identical for testing purposes. We feel disk cloning software and SSD controller technology has matured to the point where potential issues such as non-aligned sectors are no longer a potential issue. For testing, we run all tests five times dropping the highest and lowest results, then take the average of the middle three. And who said that college statistics class wouldn't prove useful? If any anomalous results are seen the test will be run again. Given the complexities of modern computers, and especially today's operating systems and the software that runs on them, we feel this provides the most accurate results possible. Finally, we are seeking to constantly improve and expand upon our SSD testing methodology. We are always actively seeking real-world workload scenarios that are bottlenecked by hard drives, so if you have any suggestions whatsoever or there is a program you would like to see included in our SSD content, then please drop by our forums and let us know! We are always looking to expand our SSD benchmarks and provide more useful and real-world results, and not just synthetic numbers. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: PCMark 7] Futuremark's PCMark benchmarking suite should need no introduction; it has been a staple of PC benchmarks for the better half of a decade. It includes over 25 individual workloads designed to measure all aspects of system performance and gives individual scores in each test as well as an overall system performance score for easy system comparisons. PCMark 7 offers a more accurate measure of performance as compared to its predecessor, PCMark Vantage. The storage scoring metrics especially were significantly re-tuned and optimized with SSDs in mind to give a more balanced disk subsystem score. Although IMFT's 20nm NAND is rated for a slightly lower write speed than the older 25nm NAND, it doesn't tangibly impact performance. The Intel 335 still outperforms the m4 in PCMark and places between the two other SSDs in our lineup that utilize SandForce controllers. Surprisingly, the 335 is even able to swap places with the Neutron in the storage composite score. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: Iometer] Originally developed by Intel - and since given to the open-source community - Iometer (pronounced “eyeawmeter", like thermometer) is one of the best storage-testing applications available, for a couple of reasons. The first, and primary, is that it's completely customizable, and if you have a specific workload you need to test a drive with, you can easily accomplish it here. Secondly, it bypasses the Windows disk subsystem entirely, meaning it bypasses the OS drivers and writes directly to the storage media. This has important implications, such as it means Windows 7 cannot correctly align Iometer to match the SSD or HDD sector alignment. We have updated our test suite to the latest stable 1.10 rc1 build of Iometer, which was released in December, 2010. This version makes some changes to be aware of; specifically, it gives the option for three types of data sets used during testing. 2006 and earlier versions used a pseudo-random dataset for testing, while the 1.10 build will default to a “repeating bytes" test pattern. A full random test mode was also added. To avoid giving SandForce drives an unfair advantage (they rely on data compression to achieve their performance), we will stick to the pseudo-random test pattern for all of our testing. We have configured Iometer for correct 4KB disk alignment using a single 8GB test file from within Windows, meaning they are acting as the host OS drive with no other drives in the system. We run individual random 4KB read and write tests at a queue depth of 3 and again at 32. Then we run the 128KB sequential read & write tests using a queue depth of 1. In addition, all drives are in a dirty state prior to testing - this means results will not be comparable to advertised manufacturer results. Our goal is to measure end-user performance under real-world conditions, and so our testing reflects typical SSD performance after it has been used for some length of time in a system. Each test pattern is run for 5 minutes to achieve an average result. In addition, we have created three Iometer disk usage scenarios that should roughly approximate database, file server, and workstation usage patterns. These scenarios are run individually for 10 minutes each within an 8GB file on the drive, which is an unusually harsh scenario for any sort of SSD...

Intel 335 Series 180GB SSD Review

Page 162 –