Intel 520 Series 240GB Solid State Drive Review

Every detail about the drive is kept on one side here with all the drives serial numbers, regulation marks and capacity all on a single sticker. The drive itself comes in a plain machined metal casing with the Intel logo embossed to one corner, on top of this is a black plastic surround keeping both sides together.

With the covers off we get to see the heart of the 520 series SSDs, to the left we can see the SandForce controller and to the right are eight of Intels own Flash ICs, each with 25nm NAND Multi-Level Cell (MLC) technology and a capacity of 16GB.  When we do the maths, this should mean the drive has a capacity of 256Gb, however 16Gb is reserved to the drive itself for parity and block replacement – securing your data.  We do note that these are the same flash circuits that would be found in the 240Gb versions of the Vertex 3 and HyperX SSDs from OCZ and Kingston.

Taking a closer look at the board we can see in more detail that the 520 series SSDs are powered by the SandForce SF-2281 controller of which we know is able to achieve very impressive read and write speeds.

On the underside of the PCB we find eight more of Intel’s 16Gb 25nm NAND IC’s.