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John Morris & Sean Portnoy

Intel SSD 520 solid-state drive bets on improved reliability over low price

By | February 9, 2012, 5:11am PST

Formerly the undisputed champ in the solid-state-drive arena, Intel has seen countless competitors enter the SSD ring, offering superior performance and cheaper prices than the chip giant. With the just-released SSD 520 series, Intel is choosing to emphasize reliability as a key differentiator from the pack.

Like many other recent SSDs, the 520 drives make use of the Sandforce SF-2281 controller to offer competitive speeds. But controllers have often been plagued with bugs that need firmware patching, so Intel has taken steps to combat durability concerns. First, it’s used top-shelf NAND flash that also contributes to performance gains, according to benchmarking by Maximum PC. It’s also offering a whopping 5-year warranty on the SSD 520, which is a couple of years longer than the typical warranty.

Of course, there’s a cost to Intel’s strategy — a literal one, in this case. As Tom’s Hardware points out, you’ll be paying a premium for Intel’s commitment to greater reliability over similar drives. The company is clearly hoping buyers are concerned enough about their data that they’re willing to spend more for a superior guarantee. Would you be?

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Sean Portnoy is a freelance technology journalist.

Disclosure

Sean Portnoy

Sean Portnoy is a freelance technology journalist; currently, all work that Sean does is on a contractural basis. Sean has also written corporate communications documents for CA.

Sean does not accept gifts from companies he covers. All hardware products he writes about are purchased with his own funds or are review units covered under formal loan agreements and are returned after the review is complete.

Biography

Sean Portnoy

Sean Portnoy started his tech writing career at ZDNet nearly a decade ago. He then spent several years as an editor at Computer Shopper magazine, most recently serving as online executive editor. He received a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. from the University of Southern California.
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RE: Intel SSD 520 solid-state drive bets on improved reliability over low price
tbanks204 10th Feb
Bad Bet
I think it's a bad gamble.
After 3 years,we will soon have terabyte SSD for under a hundred bucks and like everybody else who values their data,I have at least one copy on another system or disk.

It's just not price competitive.
I have Intel 320s in all our Panasonic Toughbooks. I wanted SSDs almost totally because of their reliability over HHDs - in our case, primarily for impact resistance. If all you want is read/write speed, there is a new/better model every week - tough marketplace - and reduced boot time is an advantage only once or twice a day at best. When SSD$/GB = HHD$/GB all this becomes academic - but until then dependability is the only semi/permanent factor driving the investment cost.
@BRD2 >

" I too have a ssd and my purchase was based on the maximum number of Nand Flash Storage for peak efficiency. For the 128GB market the ADATA 596 and Zalman S were the ideal choice in construction and features; although they are sata II. My Zalman S 128Gb has gone through handling transformations of data over the past six months, but has not slowed down. For most stuff I do admit a magnetic hard drive was a better value before the flooding in Tailand peaked pricing for common drives to $129 and much higher for 2TB &3TB storage drives."

"So as far as I'm concerned the desire for Intel to maintain a high price for their product based on the Over-Provisioning of their Sandforce ssd is competing with the obvious choice of whether you need maximum storage or what I see as a 180GB offering ssd with Intel's word that their new 25nm Nand technology from MFST will be reliable, when everyone else using similar Nand flash are struggling with warranty returns and a no refunds policy."
0 Votes
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Bad bet
docesam 9th Feb
I would say it is a bad bet.
0 Votes
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Bet on sheer volume
cwallen19803@... 10th Feb
I'm going to wait until all the Apple and Linux machines scarf these up and the price comes down. The sheer volume of those purchases will drive the cost down for the rest of us.
Have a blue-ray writer to save backups 25gigs per disk so data lost not a problem.
Half the article is about price, and you don't even say how much the thing costs. sad

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