Intel SSD 520 Series 120GB review

Sweet-spot pricing, but slightly lacking in performance

Intel SSD 520 Series 120GB
The SSD price/performance sweet-spot

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Long term performance is the big worry with SSDs.

Early drives delivered scorching performance out of the box, but quickly went down the pan with intensive usage. To simulate a used drive, we install Windows 7 and then stuff each SSD full of data.

This used to be enough to make SSDs suffer slow downs. More recent SSDs are much more resilient and Intel's SSDs in particular have a strong reputation for excellent longevity.

As our benchmarks show, however, it's not hugely remarkable in terms of raw performance

Synthetic drive performance, compressible data

Intel ssd 520 series

Intel ssd 520 series

Synthetic drive performance, incompressible data

Intel ssd 520 series

Intel ssd 520 series

Synthetic drive performance, 4K Random

Intel ssd 520 series

Intel ssd 520 series

Application performance

Intel ssd 520 series

Contributor

Technology and cars. Increasingly the twain shall meet. Which is handy, because Jeremy (Twitter) is addicted to both. Long-time tech journalist, former editor of iCar magazine and incumbent car guru for T3 magazine, Jeremy reckons in-car technology is about to go thermonuclear. No, not exploding cars. That would be silly. And dangerous. But rather an explosive period of unprecedented innovation. Enjoy the ride.