Intel 310 Series 80GB mSATA SSD Review

Name: Intel 310 Series 80GB mSATA SSD
Brand: Intel

by Paul Lilly — Monday, February 14, 2011, 01:00 PM EDT

Test System and HD Tune Pro

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. The SSDs were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, Vantage, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. And all drives were secure erased prior to the start of any testing. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System

Intel Core i7 Powered

Processor -

Motherboard -

Video Card -

Memory -

Audio -

Hard Drives -

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7 930

Asus P6X58D Premium (X58 Express Chipset)

ATI Radeon HD 5850

6144MB Corsair DDR3-1333
CAS 7

Integrated on board

Corsair Nova Series V128 128GB
Intel X-25M Gen2 80GB
Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB
OCZ Vertex 2 100GB
Samsung 470 Series 256GB

OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -

Video Drivers -

Relevant Software:
Windows 7 Professional
Intel 9.1.1.1020 w/ Matrix Storage
DirectX 11

AMD Catalyst 10.10

Benchmarks Used:
HD Tune Pro
HD Tach v3.0.1.0
ATTO v2.46
CrystalDiskMark v3
PCMark Vantage
SiSoftware Sandra 2010 SP1

We're most interested in how Intel's 310 Series compares with the chip maker's X25-M Gen2 drive of the same capacity, though we didn't limit our comparison to a single drive. Also included are a handful of high-performance SSDs, including the Samsung 470 (Samsung), Corsair Nova Series V128 (Indilinx), Intel X25-M (Intel), Kingston SSDNow V Series (JMicron), and OCZ Vertex 2 (SandForce).

HD Tune Pro

I/O Subsystem Measurement

The latest version of HD Tune Pro (v4.60) offers improved support for SSDs and we use it here to test both read and write performance broken up into minimum transfer rate, maximum transfer rate, average transfer rate, access time, burst rate, and CPU usage. What this does is a paint an overall picture of performance rather than zero in on just the average score. By doing so, we can see which drives might suffer from a stuttering problem or otherwise run inconsistently..

Intel said we could expect similar performance the X25-M, and that's exactly what our HD Tune Pro results bear out. Both the average read and write speed numbers fell in line with Intel's advertised specs, and the 310 SSD even managed to redline slightly above what it's supposed to be capable of. Not too shabby.

As expected, the X25-M turned in noticeably superior read speeds, though the gap wasn't quite as wide as the rated specs. The X25-M is rated at 250MB/s versus 200MB/s on the 310, however we only noted a 29MB/s difference in our HD Tune Pro run. We should also note that the 310 SSD turned in a comparable read score to that of OCZ's Vertex 2 100GB SSD, though OCZ pulled way ahead in write performance.