When Intel released its 510 Series solid-state drive (SSD) a year ago, it used a controller not that the giant company had created itself but rather one from Marvell. Intel hasn't gone back to keeping it "all in the family" with its newest SSD, the 520 Series, but it has chosen SandForce instead-and...

Excellent performance; Covered by five-year warranty

More expensive; but not significantly faster; than competing drives

With our test unit for the Intel 520 series 240GB SSD came a full upgrade kit as well. You have a 3.5-inch bay with multiple screws and a molex-to-SATA power cable. Manuals and software mini-disc are also part of the package.

A fantastic product at an acceptable price.

Intel has not been making SSDs for the mainstream market for as long as OCZ, but it's learned quickly, and as usual quickly worked its way into a position of power in a very short time.

SSDs have made their presence felt across more consumer products, these days, which range from notebooks to the hot new topic in town, Ultrabooks, that primarily use SSDs for storage.

While we only have Intel's MSRP's to go on at the moment, it's clear that they have a long way to drop to compete with the likes of the OCZ Vertex 3 - a drive that nips at its heels performance-wise.

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...

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.

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,...

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