Отзывы о Твердотельный накопитель Intel D3-S4610 (SSDSC2KG240G801)

If you are tech savvy and did your homework before buying a SSD drive, you may have reached the conclusion from various web articles that you should not use an SSD with Windows XP, because of the technical issues relating to drive alignment and the "trim" command that will stop you from achieving the speed benefits associated with SSDs.Those articles are wrong.Intel put together a great SSD and combined with with three pieces of software which make it easy to use their SSD with Windows XP: 1) Acronis Align Tool, 2) Intel Data Migration Software, and 3) Intel SSD Toolbox.Following the instructions that came with the drive, I attached it directly to my motherboard (not via a USB enclosure) and initialized it and formatted it as you would with a regular drive under XP.Then I ran Acronis Align tool to fix the sector offset of the SSD under XP (otherwise the SSD would have to write twice as much data as it would otherwise, because of the "sector" format of SSDs).Next, I used the data migration software to copy over my old C drive to the SSD. Keep in mind, it is important for SSDs to have lots of spare space so that the SSD cells don't wear out too quickly. I had about 60GB on my old C drive, and copied it over to a 240GB SSD. Also, in preparation for minimizing excess wear and use on the SSD, I moved the windows temp folder, the "My documents" folder and my browser's webpage cache to different drive.Next, I ran Intel SSD Toolbox optimizer, which provides a way to perform the "TRIM" command that was otherwise only available in Windows 7 or higher. Without the TRIM command, the speed of the SSD would deteriorate over time. Intel recommends that you run it once a week.I'm extremely pleased with the boot up time and quietness of the drive. Who says you can't use an SSD drive with XP? I don't know if the other SSD manufacturers have equivalent utilities, so if you want to play it safe, buy these newer Intel SSDs if you want to use it with XP.

If you are tech savvy and did your homework before buying a SSD drive, you may have reached the conclusion from various web articles that you should not use an SSD with Windows XP, because of the technical issues relating to drive alignment and the "trim" command that will stop you from achieving the speed benefits associated with SSDs.Those articles are wrong.Intel put together a great SSD and combined with with three pieces of software which make it easy to use their SSD with Windows XP: 1) Acronis Align Tool, 2) Intel Data Migration Software, and 3) Intel SSD Toolbox.Following the instructions that came with the drive, I attached it directly to my motherboard (not via a USB enclosure) and initialized it and formatted it as you would with a regular drive under XP.Then I ran Acronis Align tool to fix the sector offset of the SSD under XP (otherwise the SSD would have to write twice as much data as it would otherwise, because of the "sector" format of SSDs).Next, I used the data migration software to copy over my old C drive to the SSD. Keep in mind, it is important for SSDs to have lots of spare space so that the SSD cells don't wear out too quickly. I had about 60GB on my old C drive, and copied it over to a 240GB SSD. Also, in preparation for minimizing excess wear and use on the SSD, I moved the windows temp folder, the "My documents" folder and my browser's webpage cache to different drive.Next, I ran Intel SSD Toolbox optimizer, which provides a way to perform the "TRIM" command that was otherwise only available in Windows 7 or higher. Without the TRIM command, the speed of the SSD would deteriorate over time. Intel recommends that you run it once a week.I'm extremely pleased with the boot up time and quietness of the drive. Who says you can't use an SSD drive with XP? I don't know if the other SSD manufacturers have equivalent utilities, so if you want to play it safe, buy these newer Intel SSDs if you want to use it with XP.

I got the 120 GB drive expecting to just run games from there but I didn't realize how easy it was to migrate my entire existing C drive to the SSD.Intel provides a migration utility that lets you clone existing drives onto this drive. So I cloned my C drive (my Windows installation and my main Program Files), which lets me boot directly to the SSD as if nothing had happened. It was a very simple process and the software and guides will walk you through it.So now I am unexpectedly booting straight from my SSD without having to reinstall anything. What used to take a couple minutes to boot up and settle down is now done in seconds. Windows FLIES. So I kinda wish I'd gotten a bigger drive -- I went with 120 GB because I wasn't going to put Windows on it, but since it was easy, I did so ... but my C drive had about 80 GB on it so that was most of my space! If I'd known that cloning was going to be this easy (and good), I may have gotten the 240 GB instead.One good tip, though, if you do this:You can save yourself some space on your Windows installation drive by moving your Windows "Users" folders to another drive. In Windows 7, just open Windows Explorer, locate your "Users\YourNameHere" folder and right click on the sub-folders ("My Documents", "My Music", "Downloads", etc), go to Properties, select the Location tab and move the location to a conventional drive. Windows 7 will automatically migrate all the contents to the new location and delete the originals, freeing space on your SSD. Since I have a ton of music and some videos and so forth, this freed up 30 GB from my SSD. There's no reason to have My Music taking up expensive SSD space.As for overall ease of install, if you're comfortable installing a regular SATA drive, this is the same thing. Only fancy thing I had to do was go into my BIOS to change the drive boot order, and according to the docs, you could just swap cables instead. Note that this does come with a mount, so you shouldn't need to buy anything extra (I want to say it was a 3.5" drive mount? Meh. I just screwed it in with the other hard drives. I'm only supporting it on one side but it's not like it's heavy or has any moving parts anyway.)I guess I'll see how this is long term, but with a 5 year warranty, it may already be better than my conventional drives.P.S.I went with Intel over other brands after reading reviews and comparing warranties. Intel's 5-year warranty was the longest I could find. I might consider a cheaper brand for less essential data if I decide to get a second one but if you're installing your OS, you might want top grade. (Failure in OS = bluescreen.)

I got the 120 GB drive expecting to just run games from there but I didn't realize how easy it was to migrate my entire existing C drive to the SSD.Intel provides a migration utility that lets you clone existing drives onto this drive. So I cloned my C drive (my Windows installation and my main Program Files), which lets me boot directly to the SSD as if nothing had happened. It was a very simple process and the software and guides will walk you through it.So now I am unexpectedly booting straight from my SSD without having to reinstall anything. What used to take a couple minutes to boot up and settle down is now done in seconds. Windows FLIES. So I kinda wish I'd gotten a bigger drive -- I went with 120 GB because I wasn't going to put Windows on it, but since it was easy, I did so ... but my C drive had about 80 GB on it so that was most of my space! If I'd known that cloning was going to be this easy (and good), I may have gotten the 240 GB instead.One good tip, though, if you do this:You can save yourself some space on your Windows installation drive by moving your Windows "Users" folders to another drive. In Windows 7, just open Windows Explorer, locate your "Users\YourNameHere" folder and right click on the sub-folders ("My Documents", "My Music", "Downloads", etc), go to Properties, select the Location tab and move the location to a conventional drive. Windows 7 will automatically migrate all the contents to the new location and delete the originals, freeing space on your SSD. Since I have a ton of music and some videos and so forth, this freed up 30 GB from my SSD. There's no reason to have My Music taking up expensive SSD space.As for overall ease of install, if you're comfortable installing a regular SATA drive, this is the same thing. Only fancy thing I had to do was go into my BIOS to change the drive boot order, and according to the docs, you could just swap cables instead. Note that this does come with a mount, so you shouldn't need to buy anything extra (I want to say it was a 3.5" drive mount? Meh. I just screwed it in with the other hard drives. I'm only supporting it on one side but it's not like it's heavy or has any moving parts anyway.)I guess I'll see how this is long term, but with a 5 year warranty, it may already be better than my conventional drives.P.S.I went with Intel over other brands after reading reviews and comparing warranties. Intel's 5-year warranty was the longest I could find. I might consider a cheaper brand for less essential data if I decide to get a second one but if you're installing your OS, you might want top grade. (Failure in OS = bluescreen.)

I extensively tested and benhmarked the Samsung 830 128GB SSD versus Intel 520 120GB SSD, and also now own a Samsung 830 512GB SSD purchased on Amazon.com. My test results revealed a number of surprises, which are not noted in any reviews I could find from others.First, SSD performance is affected by the laptop's (host's) power scheme and whether it is plugged in; the best performance occurs when the laptop is plugged in!Second, for my Dell XPS 17 Core-i7 Sandy Bridge laptops, note the following:- the peSATA port is SATA II, yet it outperforms USB 3.0 significantly (!!!)- the internal SATA connectors are SATA IIIThird, and perhaps most importantly to those who are trying to decide between the Intel 520 and Samsung 830 SSDs, I have determined the following: The Samsung 830 SSD, even at 512GB, generally outperforms Intel's 520 SSD (240GB and 480GB). Moreover, the Samsung 830 512GB SSD takes only minor performance hits over its smaller 256GB sibling, whereas Intel's 520 480GB SSD takes a huge performance hit over its smaller 240GB sibling. The Samsung SSD 512GB SSD, therefore, very significantly outperfomrs Intel's 480GB 520 SSD. That is not all: the Samsung 830 includes Norton Ghost 15 (a possible value add), a full Batman game via online download (another possible value add), a SATA to USB 2.0 conversion cable (a value add), and is higher-capacity across the entire SSD line than the Intel 520 SSD line (e.g., 512GB versus 480GB). Moreover, contrary to the Intel-arranged cooked reviews from Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, and others, which intentionally and quite misleadingly compare the Intel 520 240GB SSD against Samsung's 830 512GB, the only real benefit offered by the Intel 520 SSDs over the Samsung 830 SSDs is that of a longer warranty: 5 years versus 3 years, respectively. However, Samsung too uses top-tier Flash memory in its 830 SSDs. Overall, then, the Samsung 830 SSD series outshines Intel's 520 SSD series.P.S. Though Intel, through reviewers, would have everyone believe that they have produced a stabler and thus superior firmware for the SandForce controller used in their 520 SSD series, actual owners seem to report just as many "blue screens" and other stability issues as occur for lesser brands. In other words, Intel's quality falls short in the 520 series SSDs to date. However, the Samsung 830 SSD series remains quite stable on average by comparison. This is another reason, which is easily verified by reading user reviews of these drives on sites such as Amazon.com, NewEgg.com, etc., that the Samsung 830 series represents a superior value.

I extensively tested and benhmarked the Samsung 830 128GB SSD versus Intel 520 120GB SSD, and also now own a Samsung 830 512GB SSD purchased on Amazon.com. My test results revealed a number of surprises, which are not noted in any reviews I could find from others.First, SSD performance is affected by the laptop's (host's) power scheme and whether it is plugged in; the best performance occurs when the laptop is plugged in!Second, for my Dell XPS 17 Core-i7 Sandy Bridge laptops, note the following:- the peSATA port is SATA II, yet it outperforms USB 3.0 significantly (!!!)- the internal SATA connectors are SATA IIIThird, and perhaps most importantly to those who are trying to decide between the Intel 520 and Samsung 830 SSDs, I have determined the following: The Samsung 830 SSD, even at 512GB, generally outperforms Intel's 520 SSD (240GB and 480GB). Moreover, the Samsung 830 512GB SSD takes only minor performance hits over its smaller 256GB sibling, whereas Intel's 520 480GB SSD takes a huge performance hit over its smaller 240GB sibling. The Samsung SSD 512GB SSD, therefore, very significantly outperfomrs Intel's 480GB 520 SSD. That is not all: the Samsung 830 includes Norton Ghost 15 (a possible value add), a full Batman game via online download (another possible value add), a SATA to USB 2.0 conversion cable (a value add), and is higher-capacity across the entire SSD line than the Intel 520 SSD line (e.g., 512GB versus 480GB). Moreover, contrary to the Intel-arranged cooked reviews from Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, and others, which intentionally and quite misleadingly compare the Intel 520 240GB SSD against Samsung's 830 512GB, the only real benefit offered by the Intel 520 SSDs over the Samsung 830 SSDs is that of a longer warranty: 5 years versus 3 years, respectively. However, Samsung too uses top-tier Flash memory in its 830 SSDs. Overall, then, the Samsung 830 SSD series outshines Intel's 520 SSD series.P.S. Though Intel, through reviewers, would have everyone believe that they have produced a stabler and thus superior firmware for the SandForce controller used in their 520 SSD series, actual owners seem to report just as many "blue screens" and other stability issues as occur for lesser brands. In other words, Intel's quality falls short in the 520 series SSDs to date. However, the Samsung 830 SSD series remains quite stable on average by comparison. This is another reason, which is easily verified by reading user reviews of these drives on sites such as Amazon.com, NewEgg.com, etc., that the Samsung 830 series represents a superior value.

I bought the drive to put in my Mac mini '12. It was quite an effort to get it in there, but it was so worth it. I love the warranty and Intel's legendary reliability so I'm happy with my choice. I could have saved a bit of money and gotten another drive but so far I can't complain.A few notes for Mac users:If you're going to install in a Mac that has 10.8.2 on it and your goal is *NOT* to make a Fusion Drive (if you already have everything on your HDD and you want to manually manage your OS / App SSD usage for instance) when booting into recovery Apple more or less *forces* you to make a Fusion Drive. There are guides to prevent this from happening and the Internet is your friend when it comes to research. I was lucky and knew an SSD was on the way so I didn't have anything on the HDD I needed to keep, so I just went ahead and erased the drive and now have a shiny new Fusion Drive. Always back up your stuff if you're adding a HD anyway in case you lose anything because of a forced format. Fusion Drive works extremely well, by the way. Another thing is TRIM is not enabled by default with Mac. You need to find a third party enabler or do it manually through the Terminal. I've dabbled in *nix quite a bit so I was comfortable with the Terminal method, but I know most won't.I personally get reads well in excess of 450 MB/s. This thing BLAZES. The first time I booted the mini I knew it would be fast but it's... like.... ~10 seconds fast. Holy nuggets.Also, obviously, my VirtualBox images are insanely fast. Windows XP never even shows the blue three squares that go from left to right it just blanks for a second and boom desktop. SO AMAZING.In short, I love this drive, and it's amazing.

I bought the drive to put in my Mac mini '12. It was quite an effort to get it in there, but it was so worth it. I love the warranty and Intel's legendary reliability so I'm happy with my choice. I could have saved a bit of money and gotten another drive but so far I can't complain.A few notes for Mac users:If you're going to install in a Mac that has 10.8.2 on it and your goal is *NOT* to make a Fusion Drive (if you already have everything on your HDD and you want to manually manage your OS / App SSD usage for instance) when booting into recovery Apple more or less *forces* you to make a Fusion Drive. There are guides to prevent this from happening and the Internet is your friend when it comes to research. I was lucky and knew an SSD was on the way so I didn't have anything on the HDD I needed to keep, so I just went ahead and erased the drive and now have a shiny new Fusion Drive. Always back up your stuff if you're adding a HD anyway in case you lose anything because of a forced format. Fusion Drive works extremely well, by the way. Another thing is TRIM is not enabled by default with Mac. You need to find a third party enabler or do it manually through the Terminal. I've dabbled in *nix quite a bit so I was comfortable with the Terminal method, but I know most won't.I personally get reads well in excess of 450 MB/s. This thing BLAZES. The first time I booted the mini I knew it would be fast but it's... like.... ~10 seconds fast. Holy nuggets.Also, obviously, my VirtualBox images are insanely fast. Windows XP never even shows the blue three squares that go from left to right it just blanks for a second and boom desktop. SO AMAZING.In short, I love this drive, and it's amazing.

Bought this one to use it as the OS disk for my HP Pavillion desktop computer. The system setup is AMD A6-3650 with 8GB RAM and a 1 TB disk. The Intel SSD disk come in a package loaded with all what is needed and with a small CD describing how to get it up running. To me this was very straight forward.-Turn off the computer and open the cabinet-Install the disk and connect it to an available SATA socket-Power up the computer-Download the Intel Data Migration tool ([...])-Follow the step by step guide to migrate old disk onto SSD (do a clean up of legacy data to reduce size) including a restart which kicks off the actual migration-After successful migration shut down computer and switch SATA cables between disks or simply alter boot sequence in BIOS-Verify boot through new disk and rename old disk to avoid confusion in future-Ensure to install the Intel SSD Toolbox ([...]) to maintain disk-Ensure to turn off disk defrag in Win Scheduling as you do not want that to ruin your new diskThe computer was pretty fast using the 1 TB disk but now it is just fantastic. Starting Win7 or applications is amazing, installing new software is done seconds after they started. Have a previous version of these Intel disks running Win7 on a really old Dell D620 laptop and have been running this for at least 2 years without any errors at all. Using a regular disk would have made that computer too slow to be user friendly.Have another HP desktop computer running a OCZ Vertex 3 SSD disk. This should according to spec be a really good disk as well but hasn't really impressed me. If having to chose my clear recommendation would be to pay the little extra to go with the Intel disk.Will update the review if any issues are detected.

Bought this one to use it as the OS disk for my HP Pavillion desktop computer. The system setup is AMD A6-3650 with 8GB RAM and a 1 TB disk. The Intel SSD disk come in a package loaded with all what is needed and with a small CD describing how to get it up running. To me this was very straight forward.-Turn off the computer and open the cabinet-Install the disk and connect it to an available SATA socket-Power up the computer-Download the Intel Data Migration tool ([...])-Follow the step by step guide to migrate old disk onto SSD (do a clean up of legacy data to reduce size) including a restart which kicks off the actual migration-After successful migration shut down computer and switch SATA cables between disks or simply alter boot sequence in BIOS-Verify boot through new disk and rename old disk to avoid confusion in future-Ensure to install the Intel SSD Toolbox ([...]) to maintain disk-Ensure to turn off disk defrag in Win Scheduling as you do not want that to ruin your new diskThe computer was pretty fast using the 1 TB disk but now it is just fantastic. Starting Win7 or applications is amazing, installing new software is done seconds after they started. Have a previous version of these Intel disks running Win7 on a really old Dell D620 laptop and have been running this for at least 2 years without any errors at all. Using a regular disk would have made that computer too slow to be user friendly.Have another HP desktop computer running a OCZ Vertex 3 SSD disk. This should according to spec be a really good disk as well but hasn't really impressed me. If having to chose my clear recommendation would be to pay the little extra to go with the Intel disk.Will update the review if any issues are detected.

As far as read speeds, everything is pretty fantastic. Benchmarking reaches about 470MB/s. Windows boots so fast that the Windows logo doesn't even get to finish forming before the next screen and the Windows startup sound is cut short as the computer blazes through load screens. Programs load very fast even upon first time runs...like they were already loaded into memory and then some.But when I used CrystalDiskBenchmark, my write speed was only about 80MB/s. Sure enough, I tried copying a large folder from one area of the drive to the other and Win 7 showed a consistent write speed of about 80MB/s. I called tech support which is of course out of the country (Costa Rica) and unable to do anything but read from a script. They told me I needed to use a benchmarking tool that uses compressible data. So I did, and of course the MAX write speed on one out of a dozen tests that were performed reached about 500MB/s write speed. That's cool and all, but obviously that's not the type of data being used by Win 7 for normal tasks, so why is that data used to advertise Intel's write speeds? Oh, because it's like 6X what the drive will actually be performing at in your computer. I thought this was pretty shady, and since I actually do copy large files fairly often, I had to take off two stars for poor performance and really useless tech support.TECH SUPPORT + UPDATE: They are so useless that they didn't even suggest I update my SATA controller by downloading and installing the latest Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver. This is different than the drive's firmware. This seems to have increased my write speeds to hovering right about 100MB/s (still about 400MB/s) under what the box claims I should expect. Oh well.

As far as read speeds, everything is pretty fantastic. Benchmarking reaches about 470MB/s. Windows boots so fast that the Windows logo doesn't even get to finish forming before the next screen and the Windows startup sound is cut short as the computer blazes through load screens. Programs load very fast even upon first time runs...like they were already loaded into memory and then some.But when I used CrystalDiskBenchmark, my write speed was only about 80MB/s. Sure enough, I tried copying a large folder from one area of the drive to the other and Win 7 showed a consistent write speed of about 80MB/s. I called tech support which is of course out of the country (Costa Rica) and unable to do anything but read from a script. They told me I needed to use a benchmarking tool that uses compressible data. So I did, and of course the MAX write speed on one out of a dozen tests that were performed reached about 500MB/s write speed. That's cool and all, but obviously that's not the type of data being used by Win 7 for normal tasks, so why is that data used to advertise Intel's write speeds? Oh, because it's like 6X what the drive will actually be performing at in your computer. I thought this was pretty shady, and since I actually do copy large files fairly often, I had to take off two stars for poor performance and really useless tech support.TECH SUPPORT + UPDATE: They are so useless that they didn't even suggest I update my SATA controller by downloading and installing the latest Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver. This is different than the drive's firmware. This seems to have increased my write speeds to hovering right about 100MB/s (still about 400MB/s) under what the box claims I should expect. Oh well.

Not impressed.When it does boot to W7 is does so very fast and the PC runs very fast, BUT and it is a big BUTthe SSD often freezes (up to 3 minutes) at the "starting windows" logo and will often freeze when launching programs and does not seem to be any specific program but random.In searching for a solution there are a lot of user forums that suggest modifications to the registry that may or may not help this issue. I am not comfortable messing with the registry and don't feel that I should be in there anyway, the device should just work.From what I have read, intel support is just about nonexistent, even on the Intel forum where this issue is mentioned a lot there is little or no advice from Intel staff.See page 4 post by Paul Tikkanen on Intel forum [...]for a possible solution that worked (so far) for me by updating the IDE ATA/ATAPI controller driver, Windows would not do it automatically for me.It would appear that a lot of people are choosing Crucial and OCZ Vertex 4 SSD after returning the Intel over this issue and are reporting little or no freezing issues with these 2 brands.I would suggest that you do your own research before you buy rather than trusting the Intel name as I did.

Not impressed.When it does boot to W7 is does so very fast and the PC runs very fast, BUT and it is a big BUTthe SSD often freezes (up to 3 minutes) at the "starting windows" logo and will often freeze when launching programs and does not seem to be any specific program but random.In searching for a solution there are a lot of user forums that suggest modifications to the registry that may or may not help this issue. I am not comfortable messing with the registry and don't feel that I should be in there anyway, the device should just work.From what I have read, intel support is just about nonexistent, even on the Intel forum where this issue is mentioned a lot there is little or no advice from Intel staff.See page 4 post by Paul Tikkanen on Intel forum [...]for a possible solution that worked (so far) for me by updating the IDE ATA/ATAPI controller driver, Windows would not do it automatically for me.It would appear that a lot of people are choosing Crucial and OCZ Vertex 4 SSD after returning the Intel over this issue and are reporting little or no freezing issues with these 2 brands.I would suggest that you do your own research before you buy rather than trusting the Intel name as I did.

Thoroughly checked reviews for SSDs finally concluding that the Intel 520 Series would be the first SSD to make it into a new build. This was based on two major factors: reliability due to Intel's obsession with making SanForce reliable and performance which is up there with the best. Installed fine, seemed to run OK. Took a bit to get the Toolbox working but accomplished. Then I noticed that the OS load time, though much faster than with a HD, did not compare with that of a friend's machine. After diligent search & review, decided to run the AS SSD set of bmks. (Yes, there are others such as IOMETER but AS SSD has several advantages for SSDs. Besides, there is a lot of bmk data out there on the 520 using this utility.) Discovered that the performance of my SSD was a full 200 points (total score; specific r/w, access, etc. were all lower of course) below that widely reported and, most interesting, actually went down after a "cleaning" i.e. get rid of temp files, etc. etc. and run Toolbox. Sent two e-mails to the vendor (One Stop) which went unanswered over a couple of week period. Filed for RMA which got their attention. They wanted tech support to talk to me so we did. Tech support validated the install (correct SATA port on the ASUS P9X79 PRO mbo, etc.) and readily agreed that, although allegedly freshly packaged, something was not right and that the item might indeed be defective. Worried over the outcome of the bmks, I went for refund rather than replacement. Next day, email from vendor said item was not defective and, by the way, the warranty is over so no RMA. Thus, this review is more to express concern over the supplier than the actual device. This would not be a big issue except for the 180. As a result of no RMA, I will replace it with another from another source.

Thoroughly checked reviews for SSDs finally concluding that the Intel 520 Series would be the first SSD to make it into a new build. This was based on two major factors: reliability due to Intel's obsession with making SanForce reliable and performance which is up there with the best. Installed fine, seemed to run OK. Took a bit to get the Toolbox working but accomplished. Then I noticed that the OS load time, though much faster than with a HD, did not compare with that of a friend's machine. After diligent search & review, decided to run the AS SSD set of bmks. (Yes, there are others such as IOMETER but AS SSD has several advantages for SSDs. Besides, there is a lot of bmk data out there on the 520 using this utility.) Discovered that the performance of my SSD was a full 200 points (total score; specific r/w, access, etc. were all lower of course) below that widely reported and, most interesting, actually went down after a "cleaning" i.e. get rid of temp files, etc. etc. and run Toolbox. Sent two e-mails to the vendor (One Stop) which went unanswered over a couple of week period. Filed for RMA which got their attention. They wanted tech support to talk to me so we did. Tech support validated the install (correct SATA port on the ASUS P9X79 PRO mbo, etc.) and readily agreed that, although allegedly freshly packaged, something was not right and that the item might indeed be defective. Worried over the outcome of the bmks, I went for refund rather than replacement. Next day, email from vendor said item was not defective and, by the way, the warranty is over so no RMA. Thus, this review is more to express concern over the supplier than the actual device. This would not be a big issue except for the 180. As a result of no RMA, I will replace it with another from another source.

I have been using 3 SSD drives for about 6 weeks now and have a mixed bag of feelings... For previous stories see [...]I have two laptops having 80GB and 160GB drives installed, both running Windows XP, and one desktop 320GB with Vista on it. The drives are about 60 - 70 % full, with lots of daily activity going on. I had the "Toolbox Optimization utility", aka TRIM guy, scheduled to run twice a week. The laptops got very fast, not doubt about it!Here is what has happened to me:1. System #1, 160GB, lots of code installs and data movement, suddenly got slow, XP froze. Multiple boot attempts got through to various stages of the system being loaded. After about 3 of them decided to boot standalone Acronis True Image and was able to pull a backup image off the SDD drive. Then tried to boot the system a few times, ended up with "No system disk found".Replaced the SDD with a regular drive, restored the backup image, was back in business in about 3 hrs, sweating and swearing a lot. Connected the SSD drive over USB, the system would not even detect it, looked like fried electronically. Checked the restored drive for fragmentation: the picture showed sectors used all the way up to the drives capacity, with lots of holes in between. So... did it run out of free sectors while it was on SSD?Luckily still within 30-day "no questions asked" return policy from Amazon, got the drive replaced the next day. Repeated the SSD installation procedure, booted off it and never had any problems since then (3 weeks). I am very careful now to run the TRIM utility before and after any task involving large amounts of data. Have it set to run 3 times a week automatically. Reasonably happy.2. System #2: 80GB, medium activity. System got slower, reported booting error, repeated boot got me through. Remembering the lesson from system #1, fired up TRIM utility (set to run twice a week anyway), the moment it started spinning, even before getting to 1% checked, POOF! The system froze and I got the "blue screen of death". "No system disk" on boot attempt. Found the original disk, replaced, booted OK, except data was a month old as I was not keeping up with backups (ever heard of a failing SSD drive?!, nah... right...). Connected the SSD drive via USB: seems to work electronically, data recovery utilities did not find a single file on it, it is totally GONE! Lesson learned: keep current backup! I am about to exercise the 5 years warranty rights from Intel and give it another try... Totally not happy.3. My system #3, desktop using a 320GB SSD: running Vista happily for 6 weeks now. I diligently run the TRIM utility and backups twice a week. Very happy with performance, so-so happy otherwise because I constantly need to watch what I am doing.Anyway, I wanted to share my experience with you all and ask the big question: should people be using SSD drives with systems which do not have an automatic TRIM capability? I think this is quite dangerous, despite Intel not saying anything about such dangers of the drives going completely kaputt when they run out of free sectors.

I am very impressed with this product. I installed it in less than 2 hours including the cloning of my existing hard drive. You will see a miraculous difference in startup time for bootup and in starting applications.One issue I would like to point out. The included software used to copy my existing hard disk would not allow me to keep the Windows 7 System Reserved partition at 100 MB in size. It insisted on shrinking it to 27 MB of space actually used. I tried to override this to no avail by using the custom options of the migration software but it would not let me make this larger. I'd like to point out that I have over 25 years of experience in working with and developing software and I could not find an option in the migration software that would let me do this. So if it exists then there is either a bug in the software or it is not documented clearly.So I let the migration software do the copy with only 27 MB for the reserved partition. No problem right. Well almost. Everything works fine except the Windows 7 Backup will fail as it needs at least 50 MB of free space in any partition it will back up. Also, the Windows 7 Backup will not allow you to skip backing up the reserved partition along with your C: drive. So Windows 7 backup will not work after the migration.So to solve this problem I first tried using Ghost 15 from Symantec to no avail. I purchased a copy of Acronis Disk Director 11 Home from Amazon that allowed me to resize the System Reserved partion and get the backup working. Actually using this Disk Director tool and the builtin Windows 7 partition tools did the job.Normally I don't write many reviews but hopefully this will help others that run into this issue. I plan to notify Intel as well about this.

I am very impressed with this product. I installed it in less than 2 hours including the cloning of my existing hard drive. You will see a miraculous difference in startup time for bootup and in starting applications.One issue I would like to point out. The included software used to copy my existing hard disk would not allow me to keep the Windows 7 System Reserved partition at 100 MB in size. It insisted on shrinking it to 27 MB of space actually used. I tried to override this to no avail by using the custom options of the migration software but it would not let me make this larger. I'd like to point out that I have over 25 years of experience in working with and developing software and I could not find an option in the migration software that would let me do this. So if it exists then there is either a bug in the software or it is not documented clearly.So I let the migration software do the copy with only 27 MB for the reserved partition. No problem right. Well almost. Everything works fine except the Windows 7 Backup will fail as it needs at least 50 MB of free space in any partition it will back up. Also, the Windows 7 Backup will not allow you to skip backing up the reserved partition along with your C: drive. So Windows 7 backup will not work after the migration.So to solve this problem I first tried using Ghost 15 from Symantec to no avail. I purchased a copy of Acronis Disk Director 11 Home from Amazon that allowed me to resize the System Reserved partion and get the backup working. Actually using this Disk Director tool and the builtin Windows 7 partition tools did the job.Normally I don't write many reviews but hopefully this will help others that run into this issue. I plan to notify Intel as well about this.

Mine was an isolated case and shouldn't turn everyone off to this drive. I've used other Intel SSDs (X-25M, pre-Sandforce) for years with no problem. My issues with this drive are purely anecdotal. Here's what happened...The plan was to mirror my current SSD onto this in an external enclosure with Carbon Copy Cloner. It seemed to work fine and the transfer rate was quite quick. About 85% into the process, the drive died and was no longer seen by any of my machines, either in this or other external enclosures or connected direct to a mobo via a SATA cable. In the case of connecting to the mobo, the machines would hang on boot. A quick google session found similar cases on drive failure.I purchased through Oyen Digital in St. Paul, MN (here on Amazon). They were responsive and helpful in getting the drive RMA'ed.I opted to replace this with a Samsung 840 Pro.Again, I'm sure these Intels are fine and reliable drives generally speaking (520s anyway, the 335s are seeing issues of their own), despite the performance hit on uncompressible data (relative to other modern SSDs) and the degradation they see after they get some age on them. Yes, I realize the Samsung is somewhat unproven given its newness, but this one experience was enough to make me avoid the Sandforce-based Intels.

Mine was an isolated case and shouldn't turn everyone off to this drive. I've used other Intel SSDs (X-25M, pre-Sandforce) for years with no problem. My issues with this drive are purely anecdotal. Here's what happened...The plan was to mirror my current SSD onto this in an external enclosure with Carbon Copy Cloner. It seemed to work fine and the transfer rate was quite quick. About 85% into the process, the drive died and was no longer seen by any of my machines, either in this or other external enclosures or connected direct to a mobo via a SATA cable. In the case of connecting to the mobo, the machines would hang on boot. A quick google session found similar cases on drive failure.I purchased through Oyen Digital in St. Paul, MN (here on Amazon). They were responsive and helpful in getting the drive RMA'ed.I opted to replace this with a Samsung 840 Pro.Again, I'm sure these Intels are fine and reliable drives generally speaking (520s anyway, the 335s are seeing issues of their own), despite the performance hit on uncompressible data (relative to other modern SSDs) and the degradation they see after they get some age on them. Yes, I realize the Samsung is somewhat unproven given its newness, but this one experience was enough to make me avoid the Sandforce-based Intels.

Lets start with the good:The drive is fast and like this generation of SSDs that is really not something that is uncommon. I expected very high read/write results and I got themThe bad:The reason I chose Intel SSD was because of their reliability and firmware stability. I was wondering between this and Samsung 840 pro, but the later was a bit more expensive. Right now, I'm hitting myself hard in the head for not shoving a couple of extra $$$ to get the Samsung 840 pro. From the start of Windows this SSD has been like a plague with it's freezing and BSOD. Every 30-60 seconds I got BSOD like clockwork. Just awful and really aggravating.I searched hundreds of threads online (too late) to find out that this is a know issue with this SSD and STILL NOT RESOLVED by Intel. This issue has been on for months !!! I finally was able to find a "fix" that seems to solve the issue for now, but as I read, some of the owners still experience these problems with this fix.This is a HUGE minus in my book for Intel and because of this, I'm no longer going to buy any SSD from them.Search Intel 520 BSOD F4 online before buying this SSD to get a better understanding whether you should commit to this SSD

Lets start with the good:The drive is fast and like this generation of SSDs that is really not something that is uncommon. I expected very high read/write results and I got themThe bad:The reason I chose Intel SSD was because of their reliability and firmware stability. I was wondering between this and Samsung 840 pro, but the later was a bit more expensive. Right now, I'm hitting myself hard in the head for not shoving a couple of extra $$$ to get the Samsung 840 pro. From the start of Windows this SSD has been like a plague with it's freezing and BSOD. Every 30-60 seconds I got BSOD like clockwork. Just awful and really aggravating.I searched hundreds of threads online (too late) to find out that this is a know issue with this SSD and STILL NOT RESOLVED by Intel. This issue has been on for months !!! I finally was able to find a "fix" that seems to solve the issue for now, but as I read, some of the owners still experience these problems with this fix.This is a HUGE minus in my book for Intel and because of this, I'm no longer going to buy any SSD from them.Search Intel 520 BSOD F4 online before buying this SSD to get a better understanding whether you should commit to this SSD

Ordered the drive and it arrived on the second day, a little cold having been sitting on the porch all day. Followed the install PDF on the mini cd that came with the drive. It said to download the migration software from Intel which I did. Next I put the drive inside my PC and attached to available power. I attached the included SATA cable to one of my two 6GB SATA ports on the motherboard. My motherboard has another 4 3GB SATA ports and all were used; one by a Vertex 2 80GB C: drive and the rest by a Western Digital disk and a pair of DVD drives. Powered PC up and Windows Device Manager sees the new Intel 520 240GB SSD. So I run the migration software installer. It failed to create a shortcut on my Windows desktop which threw me for a minute. But I found the program under my Program Files (x86)/Intel folder. I ran the migrate program and it has a nice UI, very simple. I cloned the Vertex 2 over to the new Intel drive. Took about 5-10 minutes. When done I swapped the SATA cables between the Vertex and the Intel as instructed. Upon reboot the PC couldnt' find the BOOTMGR and halted. After awhile I figured out this was because of my other Western Digital drive in there. I found the BIOS setting to boot on the Intel and it started. Then I switched the Intel drive back to the SATA 6GB port, had to adjust the BIOS one more time, and now I'm up and running on the new Intel SSD with more space.