Strong performance, a great price and a useful upgrade kit, but other drives are quicker for the same money
Written By
Published on 6 August 2012
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1 / 2
Our rating
Reviewed price £104 inc VAT
Intel has just refreshed its mid-range 330 Series of SSDs – the great-value 120GB version is the first we’ve seen.
The headline figure is the price; at £82 for 120GB, this SSD is a great-value 68p per gigabyte. This makes it significantly cheaper per gigabyte than the Ultimate award-winning Corsair Performance Series Pro, which is 93p per gigabyte, and the same as our Budget Buy-winning Crucial M4 128GB. Intel has largely relied on tried-and-tested components to put together such an inexpensive drive. The controller is the familiar SandForce SF-2281, which has powered the majority of SSDs we’ve seen recently, and there’s no sign of the slimmer 7mm form factor Intel uses for its high-end 520 Series drives – the 330 Series is a chunkier 9.5mm tall.
The only real surprise comes from the eight 25nm NAND chips used to put together the drive. While there’s no sign of the bang-up-to-date 24nm Toggle Mode memory, the NAND used here is synchronous rather than asynchronous; a choice that ensures better performance, as the individual chips can process data more quickly.
However, combining those particular chips with a mid-range controller returned middling benchmark results. The 330 Series wrote and read large files at 182MB/s and 361MB/s; our award-winning Corsair returned scores of 405MB/s and 367MB/s. More significantly, other budget drives are faster, with the excellent Crucial M4 128GB returning speeds of 277MB/s and 378MB/s in the same tests. The Intel drive closed the gap in our small file tests, writing and reading at 81MB/s and 59MB/s. That’s slightly faster than the Crucial M4’s 80MB/s when writing, and the same speed as the M4 when reading small files.
A bonus is that the 330 Series comes with a comprehensive upgrade kit. There’s a sturdy metal caddy to fit the 2.5in drive into a traditional 3.5in drive bay, screws, a SATA cable and even a Molex to SATA power adapter.
Intel’s 330 Series SSD is a good-value drive with a useful upgrade kit and strong performance. It can’t quite top the Crucial M4 SSD 128GB, though, which is quicker and the same price.
Written by
Chris Finnamore
Chris has been writing about technology for over ten years. He split his time between ExpertReviews.co.uk and Computer Shopper magazine, while obsessing over Windows Phone, Linux and obscure remakes of old games, and trying to defend Windows 8 from its many detractors
