Ultrabook: Intel SSD 520 Series

This family of SSDs has members with capacity ranging from 60 GB to 480 GB. The one we received for review had a capacity of 240 GB. It is built with 25 nanometer NAND Flash Memory and has standard 2.5 inch form factor. Support for SATA 3.0 (6 Gbps) means this drive would give you higher transfer rates if your board supports SATA 3.0. A 2.5-inch to 3.5-inch mounting bracket is included with the SSD for compatibility with standard hard drive mounting. This SSD also comes with data protection features comprising of Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel AES-NI) 256-bit encryption capabilities and includes on board data compression for better performance.

Intel projects this SSD as one that is high on performance and it seems they are not wrong given the high average transfer rates we got in our tests. We tested the transfer rate of this drive using HD Tune 2.55 benchmark on a Core i7 3.30 GHz machine with 1 GB RAM and Windows 7 OS and found average transfer rates of 318 MB/s. This is substantially higher when compared with Kingston Hyper 120 GB SSD we reviewed in Feb 2012, which gave 271 MB/s.

Bottomline: A good performer which also protects data using strong encryption techniques.