A fantastic product at an acceptable price.

SandForce was an unknown newcomer to the solid state drive business when they announced their first SF-1000 memory controller in 2009. Nevertheless many storage manufacturers recognized the chip's potential and moved quickly to adopt it, among them A-Data, Corsair, G.Skill, OCZ, Patriot, Super...

Excellent performance; The speed of SandForce's latest controller with the backing of Intel's testing and firmware validation

A tad more expensive than other similar drives; SSDs in general are still limited in storage capacity given the premium you pay per gigabyte

The Intel 520 Series 240GB is one of the fastest solid state drives on the market, right at the very top of our group test beside the Patriot Wildfire 240GB and Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS.

not quite as fast as the latest Samsung drives when reading imcompressible data

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

IMPORTANT: Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time.

Fastest SATA storage device ever tested; Delivers over 83K IOPS performance in IOMeter; Outstanding 559/528 MBps read/write speed with ATTO; Built-in 256-bit AES data encryption; Hardware-level data compression preserves NAND longevity; 5-Year Intel product warranty support; Enhanced power-loss data...

Expensive enthusiast-level product

On paper the new Intel 520 Series appears to be just another Team SandForce release like several of the products we've looked at for the last thirteen months. The SF-2000 Series controllers hit media testing labs in December 2010 and client drives based on the consumer SF-2281 were on display at CES...

We are using a new addition to our scoring system to provide additional feedback beyond a flat score. Please note that the final score isn't an aggregate average of the new rating system.

5 year warranty

Improved Windows games and application speed. Only minor issue, I had to reinstall Windows from scratch since the migration didn't allow to migrate partition only.

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

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