One of the best upgrades I've ever installed. The SSD is ridiculously fast. The computer starts up and shuts down in seconds instead of minutes. I was concerned about screwing up the install, which involves moving all the OS files from the hard drive to the SSD.

Fast; great install software

Nothing yet

For every season, there is a spin. Intel's first consumer SSDs, the X-25M series, didn't have the fastest performance, but they gained a reputation for reliability. We had high hopes for Intel's 320 Series SSDs, which turned out to be really great 3Gb/s SATA drives, at a time when everyone else was...

Fast SF-2281 controller and 25nm NAND; Intel reliability

$50 more expensive than near-identical drives from Patriot and OCZ

Premium SATA 6Gbps SSD from Intel based on the Sandforce

Intel's latest high-end consumer SSD, the SSD 520 series, is finally here. With the SSD 520 series, Intel has also made the switch to a SandForce controller. We pit it against the fastest drives in the market today to see how it fares.

Class-leading performance; Much improved over Intel SSD 510 series; Special firmware exclusive to Intel

Slightly pricey; Below average IOPS performance on Iometer

Great drives, the transaction went smoothly start to finish

Throughout this review, the Intel 520 has gone head to head with the OCZ Vertex 3, which is really the only other SSD that I have tested that can compete directly with the Intel 520 240GB SSD. In some cases the Intel 520 was faster than the Vertex 3, and in other cases the Vertex 3 came out on top.

Silky smooth operation as a system drive; Excellent sequential reading and writing performance; Excellent 4K random I/O performance; SATA 6Gbps support; The drive is supported by the excellent Intel SSD Toolbox; TRIM support under Windows 7; Lightning fast access times; Completely silent operation,

Expensive

The Intel 520s really scored a knockout in our ‘consumer' RAID testing exercise and, with the speed and latency displayed, it would be hard to go wrong with them. These results are some of the best I have ever experienced with so few SSDs and it wasn't so long ago that it took a whole stack of SSDs,...

Please note that this is an OEM product, even if the picture is stating that is Intel boxed product. Power/data cables are not present, also the mounting kitt.

Intel's latest batch of SSDs, the 520 Series, offers a variety of different capacities, but the 60GB is the smallest on offer. That doesn't sound like much, but it's more than enough for an installation of Windows and some key applications, which makes a smaller drive is a route to the speed of an...

A fantastic product at an acceptable price.