welcome to my unboxing of the Intel 520 series SSD I know it's another SSD
unboxing and there's not much different because this is a sand Force Space drive
and it's a 240 gig drive and these exist before but wait no no no this is other
more different sand Force drive so while the Intel 520 series drive has a San
Force SATA 3 6 GB per second controller in it okay so let's just see if there's
anything else it has to say for itself on the outside of the box before we
before we get into this okay so we got the data manufacturer which was sort of
not that long ago we got a product code we got a capacity comes in a variety of
capacities including 120 gig 240 gig okay we've got the Box contents which
we'll see obviously cuz this is an unboxing that means we open the box
super fast hard drive alternative and they right rugged silent and solid
they're right about that too and it is SATA 6 GB per second and SATA 3 GB per
second compatible comes with a 5year warranty Intel actually includes a
5-year warranty with their San Force Drive which brings me to what is special
about an Intel San Force SATA 3 6 GB per
second drive and that is that well one
why did it take them so long to get to Market I don't know if you guys remember
this but there was a there was quite a bit of flak going around about San Force
SATA 3 drives and not being reliable enough and etc etc etc and I'm going to
let you guys in on on a little secret well my suspicion of a little secret
anyway I suspect that Intel was planning
a sand Force Drive ages ago but because
they were the ones whose internal validation found that there were still
problems with it they never released one until now so not only have they
addressed the reliability issues that people were having with sand Force
drives which by and large are resolved with the other manufacturers now as well
okay so let's let's assume for a second that the reliability is equivalent which
I don't know is necessarily true because at least at NCI Intel has the lowest
return rate out of all SSD manufacturers like definitely the lowest although
they're more expensive so bear that in mind as well Intel has also tuned the
performance of their San for SATA 3 6 gbit per second drive to the point where
it is now faster than anyone else's in spite of the fact that it only uses
synchronous Intel flash it doesn't even use toggle flash so without the
advantage of the fastest possible possible flash out there they're achieving better performance than anyone
else so they have done reliability tuning and performance tuning on this
controller in order to achieve the best possible drive to deliver to their
customers so this is a replacement for the 510 series drive that performs
better and I mean what else is there to really say about it beyond that so here
we go let's have a look at the drive itself you can see there's four screws on the top that allow you to remove this
plastic piece right here allowing you to install it in laptops that require a low
profile 2 and 1/2 in Drive drive or laptops that require a full height uh 2
and 1/2 in drive you got all your standard mounting holes on the bottom you can see this equipment is provided
by the Intel demo Depot cool okay uh you
got sorry did I say you have your mounting holes here and your mounting holes here I really don't know why they
don't do something about like the finish on these drives cuz they're all kind of like this I wouldn't mind if they were
sort of a little shiny Kingston does a great job with the Aesthetics of their
drives um I don't know it just seems kind of
it's very rugged so it depends what you're after guess if you're looking for something sort of rugged and corporate
then that works uh what do we have for included accessories Intel is one of the
best when it comes to uh well included
accessories because they are very uh I
mean that's that's kind of their thing it's like with an Intel product that you
buy you expect it to come with everything you need you expect it to work 100% right out of the box it's
their corporate expectation of themselves and that customers have of
them so they include everything you need here we have the Intel data
migration software can be downlo loed from Intel.com go/ SSD installation that
only works on Intel drives and it actually does work I've used it in the
past it allows you to quickly and easily transition your system from a hard drive
to an SSD comes with a SATA cable made
by foxcom there you go foxcon makes
everything it's amazing uh then we've got five ha look at this I love it I
love it when companies do this five desktop screws five um like notebook
screws so this allows you to install it uh in whatever kind of configuration you
require so if you're using an adapter then you'll use these screws to mount
the adapter into your case and you'll use these screws to mount it to the adapter but why do they include five
they include five just in case there's a miscount so no matter what happens
you'll always have enough screws because they include five so even if you're one
short you'll still have four which is what you actually need you also get a
speed demon sticker you also get an Intel solid state drive important web
links thing you get a Molex to SATA adapt power ad
cable and you get an included 2 and 1/2
in to 3 and 1/2 in Drive sled which gives you a lot of different flexibility
more flexible options in terms of where you want to mount the drive on it maybe
you got like a hot swap cage or something like that you're going to put it in you want to make sure everything
lines up right so there you go so you'll use these screws to mount it to this and
these screws to mount this to your case which has all the same mounting points
as a 3 and half inch hard drive and is one of the more rugged and robust I mean
here I'll contrast this with what comes with uh Intel's competitor drives I
think I have one lying around over
here so I'm not going to name any names but uh this one's made of aluminum and
like look how much Flex it has which I'm not saying actually matters or anything
but you know if you're going to be Intel and overbuild everything you might as
well overbuild everything so there you have it this is the Intel 520 series SSD
and the reason I have this is I'm actually going to be doing a 240 to 256
gig SSD Roundup on my ncixcom channel so make sure you're subscribed to that one
as well because we're going to have a look at this one a couple other sand
Force drives we're going to have a look at an indel Link's Everest Drive and
finally The crucial M4 and see how they all stack up don't forget to subscribe
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