Intel SSD 525 Review (240GB)

Random Read/Write Speed

The four corners of SSD performance are as follows: random read, random write, sequential read and sequential write speed. Random accesses are generally small in size, while sequential accesses tend to be larger and thus we have the four Iometer tests we use in all of our reviews.

Our first test writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time. We use both standard pseudo randomly generated data for each write as well as fully random data to show you both the maximum and minimum performance offered by SandForce based drives in these tests. The average performance of SF drives will likely be somewhere in between the two values for each drive you see in the graphs. For an understanding of why this matters, read our original SandForce article.

Random read performance is basically identical to the 520, and middle of the pack compared to other SSDs here. If we limit the comparison to just mSATA drives, only Micron's C400 does a better job.

Random write performance with data that's easily compressed is a clear win for the 525. It's clear the Intel has done some work under the hood as the 525 even outpaces the 520 here. Even when faced with incompressible data, the 525 does quite well (although its advantage over the 520 disappears).

Many of you have asked for random write performance at higher queue depths. What I have below is our 4KB random write test performed at a queue depth of 32 instead of 3. While the vast majority of desktop usage models experience queue depths of 0 - 5, higher depths are possible in heavy I/O (and multi-user) workloads:

SandForce drives do a good job scaling with queue depth and we see the 525 behave as expectedly here. Both it and the 520 converge to the same performance levels.

Sequential Read/Write Speed

To measure sequential performance I ran a 1 minute long 128KB sequential test over the entire span of the drive at a queue depth of 1. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length.

Sequential performance is once again near identical to the 520, with the 520 pulling ahead in sequential writes.

AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Performance

The AS-SSD sequential benchmark uses incompressible data for all of its transfers. The result is a pretty big reduction in sequential write speed on SandForce based controllers.

Incompressible performance is very similar to the 520, although once again the 525 does pull ahead slightly.