SSDs, or Solid State Drives, are a relatively new storage device that use flash memory instead of spinning magnetic media. That have no moving parts. They are much faster than their hard drive counterparts. When first released, they had extremely small capacity compared to a hard drive and were very expensive. Over time, the price has dropped and size has increased.

The capacities of the Intel 520 Series are 60gb, 120gb, 180gb, 240gb, and 480gb. The interface on these drives is SATA-600. Specifications ont he 240gb is as follows:

The capacities of the Intel 520 Series are 60gb, 120gb, 180gb, 240gb, and 480gb. The interface on these drives is SATA-600. Specifications ont he 240gb is as follows:

• Max Sequential Read: Up to 550 MB/s (SATAIII)
• Max Sequential Write: Up to 520 MB/s (SATAIII)
• 4KB Random Read: Up to 50,000 IOPS
• 4KB Random Write: Up to 60,000 IOPS
• MTBF: 1,200,000 hours

This compares to one of our favored drives, the Western Digital 1002FAEX Caviar Black, as follows:

• Transfer Rate, Minimum: 65 MB/s
• Transfer Rate, Average: 108 MB/s
• Transfer Rate, Maximum: 136 MB/s
• Access Time: 12.3 ms

Note that the convential drive has an 'access time' specification. This is the average time required to move the head to a given position in order to read the date. SSD drives have no corresponding parameter. There are no heads to move, the data is immediately available and transferred. This makes drive defrag completely unnecessary, and makes for much faster boot times when data is ready from many areas of the drive.

A single 120gb, or even 240gb, SSD is generally not large enough for today's storage needs. For the best performance, we recommend use of a 120gb to 240gb SSD drive in conjunction with a 1tb to 3tb secondary data drive. This gives you both speed and storage. Use the SSD for your operating systems and programs, the hard drive for your data.