Intel 510 Series 120 Go

Intel SSD 510 Series 120GB Review

The OCZ Vertex 3 240GB blew us away when we reviewed it earlier this month. Its lighting fast transfer speeds and application performance left no room for the competition to breathe -- including the once-praised Samsung 470 Series and Crucial RealSSD C300 drives. The Vertex 3 proved to be dramatically faster than its predecessor, and perhaps just as important, that speed comes at nearly the same cost. Having surpassed some of the best SSDs we've tested, we were left to wonder if the Vertex 3 would remain unattested in the short-term. With Crucial's M4 shaping up to be a mainstream drive, who else could rise to the challenge? We may have an answer to that question today as we test the closest thing the Vertex 3 has to competition: Intel's new flagship SSD 510 Series. Considering all the achievements Intel earned with its X25-M drives, hardware enthusiasts were to expect Intel to oppose OCZ's juggernaut. The company has recently launched three new SSD lines: the 310, 320 and 510 Series. The SSD 310 Series is intended for notebooks or other small form-factor devices and comes in 40/80GB flavors that use 34nm MLC NAND flash memory. They feature the same controller used by Intel's X25-M G2 (the Intel PC29AS21BA0) and offer read/write speeds of 200/70 MB/s over SATA 3Gb/s.