Shopping CartIntel 320 Series 120 GB SATA 3.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid-State Drive Retail Box
date : November 12th, 2011PC Components
Review : 3 Reviews
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List Price : $ 269.00
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Tags : 2.5Inch, Drive, Intel, Retail, SATA, Series, SolidState
- Sequential read performance of 270 megabytes per second (MB/s)
- Unlike traditional hard disk drives, Intel Solid-State Drives have no moving parts, resulting in a quiet, cool, rugged storage solution
- Couple that performance with random writes of 14,000 IOPS and sequential writes of 130MB/s to unleash your system.
- Designed to satisfy the most demanding users and technology enthusiasts, the Intel SSD 320 Series brings high-performance storage
- Random read performance of 38,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS)
- Brings reliability to notebook and desktop systems
- Intel Solid-State Drives have no moving parts
- Life expectancy of 1.2 million hours mean time between failures
- Random read performance of 38,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and sequential read performance of 270 megabytes per second (MB/s)
- Results in a quiet, cool, rugged storage solution with a life expectancy of 1.2 million hours mean time between failures
- The Intel Data Migration Software clones the operating system and files from a hard drive or SSD to any Intel SSD.
- The Intel SSD 320 Series brings high-performance storage and reliability to notebook and desktop systems
- The free software supports Microsoft Windows 7, Vista and XP
Intel Solid-State Drives just got better. The next generation Intel SSD 320 Series offers built-in data protection features, better performance, larger capacities and more value for your money.
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Freakin’ Awesome: Six Stars,
This is my first SSD, and I absolutely love it. Very fast boot up and shut-down;
incredibly fast program launch – even monsters like Photoshop: blam – they’re on.
Since my system worked reasonably well before, I worried about every aspect
of this project. (If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Why spend the $250, what if I have boot problems,
what if the performance increase is marginal or worse?). Incredibly the installation
was totally quick and flawless. Bravo, Intel! Now for some details.
I bought the retail kit ($10 to $25 more than the OEM version). The two cables
are handy (sata power and data), I used the bracket, and even the
tiny 3 inch CD with installation instructions was useful. Amazingly,
those instructions are not on Intel’s website.) They worked flawlessly.
I installed it in my 2008 Intel desktop tower that runs Windows XP Pro
32-bit and that has an Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 processor. This system was top
of the line when I bought it, so I really wanted to wait another year before
upgrading to a 64-bit OS (to get > 4gb of DRAM) and a faster processor
(like Ivy Bridge). I love WinXP, and I have a lot of old drivers, so I was hesitant
to upgrade to Win7 now or to make any expensive hardware upgrades now.)
I think I made the perfect choice, but this decision was not without anxiety.
After reading all the reviews for Intel’s SSD X25-M (it’s Gen 2,
34 nano SSDs), it was apparent that most buyers raved about them:
their speed and their reliability, but, cruising the internet you
find all kinds of potential worries. I list them here, only to dismiss them.
(BTW, the Series 320 SSDs are from Intel’s 25 nano fab in Utah: they are
even faster and more reliable than the X25-M series. Although they only
support 3gb/sec data transfer, that’s all my old mobo can dish out, so that’s fine.)
1) SSDs, WinXP, and TRIM. This was a worry, since WinXP was written a decade ago,
long before SSDs. My worry was that WinXP does not support TRIM, which is
a command to tell the SSD to overwrite deleted data. Without TRIM, the efficiency
of the SSD might deteriorate due to unavailable pages. The solution for WinXP is
to use a small, free program, the Intel Solid-State Drive Toolbox, to perform this
drive optimization. (Win7 does it automatically.) So, a non-worry -
not a reason to upgrade to Win7. BTW, SSDs and TRIM are explained in a
well-written 2009 article on AnandTech “The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs.”
2) SSDs and BIOS or other drive recognition problems. This was a huge worry,
since this has been a recurring catastrophe about every five years: having a
hard drive that simply does not show up either in Windows, or even worse, not in
the BIOS. I spoke to some professionals; they had never experienced this when
installing Intel SSDs on customers desktops. In fact, I did not have to touch the
BIOS at all. I just connected the sata power and data cables, and the drive
magically appeared on the BIOS list and in Windows (on the Device Manager drive list).
(The ‘raptor HD is disconnected for now.)
3) Installing Windows (or anything) on the SSD. I need to mention that although,
I could SEE the SSD in the Device Manager, it does NOT show up on “My Computer”
along with the C drive. The reason is that it ships, of course, unformatted.
(I had hoped to just copy my entire mechanical hard drive (a WD 600 gb Velociraptor)
to the SSD using Norton Ghost.) Instead, I resorted to reading the directions that came with
the drive on that tiny little CD. Again, Intel to the rescue with their Drive Migration software
provided by Acronis. Don’t be scared off by the minutiae of that program. In fact, you only
use one single command: Clone Now – the rest is automatic.
The bottom line is that this was a hugely worthwhile and easy project with a
thrilling result: incredibly fast performance. I think mechanical drives will go the way
of magnetic tape: for archival storage only and to museums. (I also write about
the future of biotech, neuroscience, and AI: see BobBlum.com )
PS: Don’t stress about mounting the SSD. (See the YouTube “Samsung SSD Awesomeness”
with the guy trampolining with 24 SSDs.)
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|A few things you need to know about these drives !!!!,
I have a DV7 series HP Pavilion Laptop running Win 7 64-bit with the Hitachi drive that seems to have the life-span of about 18-months on all 3 of my laptops. When I noticed the classic cluster errors, I decided to pick up this SSD drive as an OS only drive and have a second drive as my storage within the laptop.
Installation was quick and easy. The migration was a breeze. I’ve been doing IT for over 15-years: computers, routers, switches, firewalls, so I was expecting the worst and got the best.
Here’s where it gets bad.
About 5 hours into use I get the Blue Screen of Death. No big deal, reboot and figure out what app decided not to play nice. No luck! The drive was bricked! I got another drive and did the entire process again. This time while running OO Defrag I get the BSOD and this drive is bricked too. I moved it to another laptop to look at the drive. The 80-Gig partition turned into an 8-Meg partition. The rest of the drive is missing. Missing as in not even recoverable by FDISK or any other means within Windows.
I plugged in “Intel SSD 80 Gig 8″ on Google and sure enough a TON of people are having the same problems. The drive just fails randomly and they’re left with an 8-Meg drive. Some people are using 3rd party applications to force the drive to recover to factory defaults or just sending them back to Intel. Some even after sending them back to Intel have a failure a month or two later. I already invested nearly 10 hours of time and I am not doing it again. For people considering buying this drive I suggest you pass on it because of the possibility of it being a ticking time bomb in your computer is too much to risk.
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|speed.. wow,
This is my first SSD drive. Boy does it make a difference compared to a standard notebook 7200rpm mechanical drive. Weight wise, it’s about the same. Less power consumption, better performance. I can’t speak for reliability just yet, but this worked without a hitch.
The drive comes in a height of 9.5mm, however my notebook a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 only accepts 7mm drives. The Intel 320 SSD series uses a black spacer. The spacer has to be removed in order for the drive to fit in my notebook. To remove the space you must remove the screws, remove the plastic spacer, and find some hard drive screws. Even though the spacer can be removed (this does not void the warranty, unlike other drives such as the Crucial m3/m4 drives), I had to take screws out of an old 2.5″ hard drive. The screws removed are a little longer to accommodate the height of the spacer. Once I screwed in the shorter screws I was ready to go.
I plugged in the drive and restored my OS. Significant difference in performance.
I also appreciate the 5 year warranty (extended from 3 years by Intel to prove that the drive is more reliable). However, Intel clearly states, while the drive itself is warranted for 5 years, all SSD drives have a lifespan, the amount of physical writes to the NAND. Once it hits Intel’s specified maximum, I think it’s 20GB a day for 5 years, if you reach this limit before 5 years, a bit is flipped on the drive and the drive is no longer warranted.
So a comment related to the “Retail kit” vs the OEM version. Both drives come with the 5 year warranty, but for $4, the retail kit is totally worth it. It comes with a 3.5″ bracket if you wanted to install this onto a desktop computer. A SATA cable and power converter is also bundled. I think the big plus is the SATA to USB 3.0 cable that comes with the drive. While it’s meant for migration from a previous drive, you can use it as a way to externalize SATA drives. For 2.5″ drives, it also comes with a very thin rubber case. The rubber case is not going to protect the drive from a drop, but it’ll at least help the little bumps.
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