Picked one of these up today from their West Ryde store in Sydney. Was going to get a Samsung 850 EVO which may still be 'best in class' despite this new model from Intel. Went Intel as it is almost the same price as the current special on the Samsung from Kogan/DSE, and when I tried they were out of stock. Also, they only came with standard 12 mth warranty at that price.
- Same 5 year warranty as locally purchased 850 EVOs
- Higher MTBF 1.6M hours (850 EVO: 1.5M)
- Supports TRIM and SMART monitoring (as per 850 EVO)
- Full AES 256-bit encryption (as per 850 EVO)
- 7mm thick (as per 850 EVO)
- Claims to beat the Samsung on speed:
Sequential Read (up to) 560 MB/s
Sequential Write (up to) 480 MB/s
Random Read (8GB Span) (up to) 78000 IOPS
Random Write (8GB Span) (up to) 85000 IOPS
Latency - Read 50 µs
Latency - Write 50 µs
Power - Active 90 mW Typical
Power - Idle 50 mW Typical
Those are the Pros. Not sure what Cons are other than:
- Not 3D NAND, Hynix TLC instead… There is some conjecture around this at present
- It formats to 480GB. maybe Samsung's gives 500GB (That's what the 850 EVO has on the box, so imagine that is what they format to). May not be so bad as Intel's keeps more memory cells in reserve and thus may be more durable (?) At 480GB from 16x32GB NAND chips, it is over provisioned by ~7%.
- Colour is silver, not black (is this bad?)
Special pricing lasts a little longer, I think.
No longer available.
This drive is thrashed by the Smasung 850 EVO 500GB in certain situations: for example 30GB average file transfer speed 130MB/s vs ~480MB/s
http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/intel-540s-series-ss…