Intel 520 Series Solid-State Drive 180 GB SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5-Inch - SSDSC2CW180A310 (Drive Only)

The Intel 520 series represents an update of Intel's SSD line, which has traditionally offered very high reliability for a decent price, though especially early on was not at the top of the heap in terms of read and write speeds. I bought this in the 240GB version to upgrade my wife's ThinkPad X201, and the update has made her machine even snappier. Disk-bound tasks are done in a flash; file transfers that once took minutes now take a matter of some seconds.The transfer was a bit of a sticking point. I was unable to use an  existing external 2.5" drive case)  to do the transfer with the included Acronis software, since that case apparently does not transmit full enough device info to the OS, which caused the software to exit. I wound up buying  another transfer cable  at extra expense.The transfer software then finished successfully on the first try, but I didn't much like the way it apportioned the space. My wife's old 500 GB drive had a 1.17 GB system partition, and a recovery partition of about 10 GB at the end, with the space in the middle taken up by one last huge partition. I began by archiving wasteful data, getting her C: partition down to about 80 GB, then was able to shrink that partition (at somewhat of a hassle due to "unmovable files"; Google is your friend if you are having the same issue). I then had 1 1.17 GB partition, followed by an ~80 GB partition, followed by a bunch of unused space, followed by a ~10 GB hidden recovery partition.Well, the way this all transferred over, the 1.17 GB partition grew to 2.8 GB, the recovery partition grew to about 23 GB, and the rest was given to the C: partition, with no unused space left over. It is a bit irksome that I will have to someday monkey about with partition management software if my wife is to see the full use of her purchased drive space, though for now I'm leaving things as-is.Pros and cons of this model as I see them:+ Intel is known for reliability of their SSDs, extremely much so, due to extensive engineering and testing in this area; Intel's reliability engineering for this drive is reported to include creating special firmware with the manufacturers of the Sandforce controller itself+ A huge leap forward in speed, compared with the 510 series and previous laptop SSDs from Intel; this drive is screaming fast for both reads and writes, and competitive with the best laptop SSDs on the market today+ Spacer/shim can be removed to use the drive in slimmer late-generation 7mm laptop drive bays, as well as left in place for older 9.5mm ones+ Transfer software is included to make cloning an old drive easier (though it may entail a bit of extra expense, as it did for me)+ Intel SSD Toolbox software eases maintenance of the drive, and is free+ A 5-year warranty is included- SandForce controller may mean less reliability than previous Intel drives; frequent backups are advised for important data (always advisable anyway)- SandForce technology means this drive is not as power-miserly as many previous Intel drives (though it is also much faster, which must be weighed in any determination of efficiency); the drive has been tested independently by StorageReview as drawing much more power at peak than Intel claims in marketing info, and draws somewhat more (about .8 watts instead of .6) at idle, which is about middle of the pack for power consumption of late-model SandForce drives- Transfer software simply grows all pre-existing partitions proportionally, which is guaranteed to be wasteful for such items as system and recovery partitions; to avoid this, one should take care to match partition sizes to about the capacity of the target drive prior to transfer, a step that I would have appreciated being advised to take

No matter what your reason for considering this Solid State Drive (SSD) purchase, I definitely recomment this large Intel 520 Series SSD. Let's walk through the decision process.If you are considering SSD vs. no SSD, you will find that all articles recommend SSD for performance reasons. It really makes that much difference. The cost-per-gigabyte equation can't touch traditional hard drives, so understand that this decision is really a matter of paying for performance. As of Spring 2012, you'll pay up to $2 per GB of SSD compared to perhaps 10 cents per GB of rotational hard drive. As any professinoal will tell you, the performance bottleneck on PCs is I/O, and most I/O is to/from you disk drive. Improving disk performance improves overall PC performance in all applications except perhaps scientific computating. Also, SSD's are less prone to failure because they have no moving parts. They similarly survive better in varying temperature, humidity, and impact (shock) situation. I've seen a Kingston video where they hit their SSD with a baseball bat and then drive a car over it. It still works.If you are considering a small SSD in combination with a larger traditional drive vs. a large SSD alone, you'll want this large SSD if you can afford the price difference. Using a combination of drive technologies requires some means to manage which files are on which drive. This is cumbercome if performed manually, but that's the best practice recommended on Tom's Hardware (a site I greatly respect). General guidance: install your operating system (OS) on the SSD; install your most-used software on the SSD also; then store your large multimedia files (movies, music, etc.) on the slower mechanical hard drive. That advice works if you are using your PC for multimedia purposes. By contrast, game PCs require tons of large software installations that won't fit on a small SSD. I know some gamers, especially the train simulator community, who manually move game files back and forth between drives depending upon which one they are running that day. You should know about an alternative that does not require manual management of files: SSD caching. This intelligent caching algorithm is implemented *only* on motherboards containing the Intel Z68 chipset. The two drives then appear as a single C: drive to the Windows operating system. Write-to-disk performance is not improved because everything is ultimately written to the mechanical drive for permanent storage. But read-from-disk operations (like boot-up, starting apps, or loading new game levels) mostly runs at SSD speeds. Between the OS and the Z68 chipset, there's an intelligent algorithm that predicts which files you read-in most. Thanks to that intelligence, a virus scan that touches every file does not count toward the caching prediction. SSD caching is limited to 64GB of SSD, so larger disks do not help. Check Tom's Hardware again for benchmarks (which improves over time as usage behavior improves predictions) and for the reasons you don't realize full SSD speeds under Z68 SSD caching.If you are considering a large SSD vs. a small SSD, go large. One obvious reason is the undeniable truth that you always fill up your hard drive eventually. But there is a reliability factor in this decision also. SSD technology can only re-write the bits a limited number of times. That limit is long enough not to affect most users for the typical life of a PC, and reaching that limit just means the disk can't write to that spot anye more - you don't lose data already written. But the time to reach that limit is shorter if you re-write sectors more often in your PC. That's the reason you *never* defragment an SSD. But it's also the reason why larger SSDs last longer, even if you never come close to filling it. An SSD's built-in controllers actually force new write operations into the next sequence of unused space, avoinding tmpy space that has been previously used. When write operations reach the end, it starts the sequence over (obviously not overwriting areas with data). Note in the previous two sentences that "unused" is different from "empty". This is an over-simplified summary of the algorithm, but they all aim to avoide re-writing the same section too many times. In a small disk, there is less empty space so it must be overwritten more frequently. In a large drive with vast empty space, it takes much longer before a once-used section needs to be used again.If you are considering the Intel brand and the 520 Series specifically vs. other brands and models, definitely choose the Intel 520 Series. For performance reasons alons (more reasons to follow), any brand of SSD is a significant improvement. According to Tom's Hardware benchmarks, the improvement going from mecahnical drive to the slowest SSD is huge compared to the improvement between the slowest and fastest SSD. So why does it matter which SSD brand? Two reasons: performance *and* reliability. Intel - always - has offered the most reliability among all SSD brands. They include additional storage used transparently to ensure recover from erros (this 480GB drive actually contains 512GB internally). Also, Intel get first pick of the most reliable memory chips from the same foundry all the vendors use. Since SSDs first hit the consumer market, it's been a choice between Intel's reliability vs. other brands' speed. The 520 Series changed everything. Even though all SSDs are faster than their counterparts, you're paying that higher price-per-GB to get that performance. Among SSD brands, those with an internal SandForce controller always top the performance benchmarks. Intel's 520 Series is their first line to use the SandForce controller. Now, there is no SSD on the planet that can beat the Intel 520 Series in *either* performance or reliability. and nobody comes close when considering the combinatino of the two.One final note: Don't implement RAID-0 or any form of RAID striping for your SSD. RAID is a performance technique by which you install multiple hard drives in an array and split the I/O load among them. This is still an excellent performance improvement for traditional mechanical drives, although the simple striping of RAID-0 makes every disk a failure risk that takes out all of the data stored. However, when impleemented for SSDs, RAID forces TRIM support to be turned off inside each drive. Readers can research the impoerant of SSD TRIM elsewhere. Just accept that TRIM was the technology answer that made the new generation of SSDs effective, fast, and reliable. When it comes to SSDs, performance hounds like me must go against our natural inclination toward defragmentation and RAID and simply accept the new drive in its purest form.OK - another final note: Update the SSD's firmware *before* installing the OS. This is so importnat for any SSD regardless of brand or model. SSD vendors fix issues with firmware updates the same way software developers publish patches. But you can't flash your SSD firmware safely without risking the software and data installed there. You need to install your new SSD inside your PC and upgrade firmware before actually using it. Several web sites discuss how to perform this functinos, and it's not for the casual end-user. I recommend following instructions from your SSD vendor's site, but in general it involveds three steps. First, use another PC to find and download the latest firmware for your specific model SSD. Second, create a bootable CD containing that new firmware. Third, boot your new PC from that bootable CD and follow instructions. In my 3 latest PC builds, I have to change a motherboard setting about disk drive connection to allow the bootable disk's utility to perform the firmware installation. Again, just follow the SSD vendor's instructions.

I picked up the 240 gig version of the 520 for my Thinkpad W520. Since my laptop has SATA 3, I figured I'd go all out, and didn't mind spending a bit for what was touted as being the best SSD around, blessed with custom Intel firmware. So what if Intel packages this drive with a small CD that contains warranty information but not their drive cloning utility? It just gives me more time to think about how much faster my computer will be!The speed was great, and it was definitely on the faster side of every benchmark I could throw, but as time went on, I had this nagging feeling that I let hype make my purchasing decision. And as reviews started flowing it, it looked like the 520 series may not be the drive to beat.Eventually, I caved, and gave the  Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240 GB SATA 6.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (MKNSSDCR240GB-DX)  a try, based on what I was seeing on some review sites.Sure enough, the Chronos Deluxe was knocking off my shiny 520 on every test. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't massive. But 80 points on R+W in DriveBench and nearly 400 points overall was quite an eye-opener -- especially when the Mushkin drive costs nearly 20% less. Granted, you give up two years' worth of warranty. By the same token though, Mushkin's been around for a really long time, and they're based out of Colorado if you ever need help.If I hadn't read some other reviews, I'd be happily chugging along with my 520. By all accounts, it is a very good drive with a very nice warranty. But when comparing speed and value, the Chronos Deluxe is a very compelling alternative.

Erst mal vorweg: Die SSD arbeitet super schnell und wurde bei meiner Neuinstallation von Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit auch sofort richtig erkannt. Es handelt sich hier auch um eine der günstigsten 240GB SSDs die man zur Zeit bekommt.Prefetch, Superfetch, Defragmentierung, Indizierung und den hybriden Standby Modus mußte ich aber selbst deaktivieren.Entgegen anderer Rezensionen zu diesem Artikel (nicht der Produktbeschreibung) wurde aber nur die Festplatte ohne jegliches Zubehör geliefert.Der Lieferumfang umfasst wirklich nur die SSD. Keine Kabel, keine Schrauben, keinen Einbaurahmen und auch keinen 2.5 -3.5 Zoll Adapter.Zum Glück hatte ich selbst alles, was man für den Einbau benötigt.Man bekommt also hier, wenn man den letzten Produkttests glauben schenken kann, eine SSD von akzeptabler Qualität zum kleinen Preis - so weit so gut.Zwei Sterne Abzug gibt's allerdings, weil die Produktrezensionen darauf schließen lassen, dass man hier die Retail Version inklusive Zubehör erwirbt, was definitiv nicht der Fall ist.

Diese SSD ist schneller als die neuere Version 530, habe beide getestet.Da ich schon seit längerem 2Jahre eine 520 180GB Version nutze und diese immer noch bei 100% steht hatte ich gedacht das die neuere schneller wäre. Die kleinere 180GB ist jetzt umgezogen in einen Notebook und mein Desktop hat eben diese wieder bekommen. Intel ist nicht die schnellste SSD aber sehr zuverlässig und damit eine volle Kaufempfehlung. Ich hatte noch nie Probleme damit. Habe auch schon andere Hersteller gehabt.

Llevo 1 año y 8 meses usando este disco duro. Simplemente espectacular: es rapidísimo y sobre todo muy fiable. Mi anterior disco SSD fue un OCZ Vertex que falló al cabo de un año. Cuando un SSD falla los datos son irrecuperables, es un drama. Elegí Intel por su fiabilidad y estoy muy satisfecho.Algunas estadísticas de hdparm que te pueden servir de orientación sobre su rendimiento:/dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 12160 MB in 2.00 seconds = 6083.53 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 1198 MB in 3.00 seconds = 398.88 MB/secAhora bien, si estás pensando en un disco SSD de Intel a día de hoy (6-sep-2014) te recomendaría la serie 530, que es el modelo renovado y es más barato.

Das ist jetzt meine zweite von Intel. Ich kann nur sagen die sind jeden Cent wert.ich kann das vorbehaltlos zu 100% empfehlen. Da ich Softwareentwickler bin ist sie wirklichjeden Tag im Einsatz ausser Wochenende. Ich habe die Platten jetzt schon einige Zeit im Einsatzund es gibt nicht mal den Anschein eines Problems.

Nach meinem Messungen ist die Platte rund 30% schneller als meine alte Vertex II. Der Einbau war unproblematisch. Die Intel SSD Toolbox ist super. Zubehör-Ausstattung ebenfalls gut.Direkte vergleiche mit anderen aktuellen Platten habe ich nicht gemacht - insofern subjektiv bewertet.