Intel 730 Series 480GB Review

Introduction

Solid State drives have come a long way since the early days. They are now searingly fast at even the smallest capacity, and the movement towards more mature hardware controllers and operating systems being more adept at utilising them has meant that you can purchase almost any model with a warm glow in your heart.

There is, however, always the underlying niggle that perhaps your drive will give up the ghost out of the blue and cost you immense data loss. After all a mechanical drive starts to knock and click before it dies which gives you enough warning to attempt to back up. What we really need is a SSD that has the raw speed of a desktop model, but with the reliability of an enterprise solution.

Neat segue.

The Intel 730 Series is exactly that. Combining Intel’s enormous knowledge base and workstation experience with the speed demanded of desktop users, it hopes to be all things to all users. That’s a bold target to aim for, but if anyone can bring it to fruition then Intel surely at the company to do so.

Technical Specifications

Rather than take a controller such as the SandForce one and crowbar it into their product, Intel have created their own 3rd Generation SSD controller that is capable of dealing with the demands of uncompressed data that modern operating systems place upon it, and then overclocked it all to eke even more performance out. The controller is greatly increased, up from 400MHz to 600MHz, and even the NAND bus speed has been bumped from 83MHz to 100MHz. Even with the 480GB capacity model we can’t foresee many people going beyond the 70GB/day endurance quotient.