| Intel SSD 520 Series Solid State Drive |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Storage | |
| Written by Olin Coles | |
| Monday, 06 February 2012 | |
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Page 9 of 11
EVEREST Disk BenchmarkMany enthusiasts are familiar with the Lavalys EVEREST benchmark suite, but very few are aware of the Disk Benchmark tool available inside the program. The EVEREST Disk Benchmark performs linear read and write bandwidth tests on each drive, and can be configured to use file chunk sizes up to 1MB (which speeds up testing and minimizes jitter in the waveform). Because of the full sector-by-sector nature of linear testing, Benchmark Reviews endorses this method for testing SSD products, as detailed in our Solid State Drive Benchmark Performance Testing article. However, Hard Disk Drive products suffer a lower average bandwidth as the capacity draws linear read/write speed down into the inner-portion of the disk platter. EVEREST Disk Benchmark does not require a partition to be present for testing, so all of our benchmarks are completed prior to drive formatting. Linear disk benchmarks are superior bandwidth speed tools in my opinion, because they scan from the first physical sector to the last. A side affect of many linear write-performance test tools is that the data is erased as it writes to every sector on the drive. Normally this isn't an issue, but it has been shown that partition table alignment will occasionally play a role in overall SSD performance (HDDs don't suffer this problem).
The high-performance storage products we've tested with EVEREST Disk Benchmark are connected to the Intel P67-Express SATA 6Gb/s controller and use a 1MB block size option. Read performance on the Intel SSD 520 Series solid state drive measured average speeds of 489.4 MB/s, with a relatively close maximum peak speed of 495.5 MB/s. Everest linear write-to tests were next...
The waveform chart below illustrates how well the Intel SSD 520 Series manages file transfers, and makes linear write performance appears relatively even. The results seen here are still relatively consistent compared to most other SSD products we've tested in the past. The Intel SSD 520 Series-series solid state drive recorded an average linear write-to speed of 467.2 MB/s, with maximum performance reaching 474.4 MB/s. The chart below shows the average linear read and write bandwidth speeds for a cross-section of storage devices tested with EVEREST:
Linear tests are an important tool for comparing bandwidth speed between storage products - although HDD products suffer performance degradation over the span of their areal storage capacity. Linear bandwidth certainly benefits the Solid State Drive, since there's very little fluctuation in transfer speed. This is because Hard Disk Drive products decline in performance as the spindle reaches the inner-most sectors on the magnetic platter, away from the fast outer edge. In the next section we use PCMark Vantage to test real-world performance...
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Comments
While these drives are appreciably more expensive than equally performing models from other companies, one would hope that a lot more testing and quality controls went into making them, and there's no way to test for reliability between brands in a review like this, you need to run tests for a long period of time using large numbers of drives and the expense and time of such an undertaking would be beyond the capabilities of a review site.
I am concerned with the 520's reliance on the bios password for encryption. Isn't the bios password fairly easy to hack? If my laptop 'walks off' is my data really 100% secure or is it readily available to anyone who can garner the bios password?
Although I do not use it personally, it is my understanding that TrueCrypt works perfectly on an SSD.
I think the origin for this mixup is comming from the first sandforce controlled SSDs - they encrypted the data on the memory chips, but users had no way to enter a password since ATA HD security was not supported. back then it was no security enhancement at all. encryption was just used as a cheap way to randomly scatter data over the NAND as a wear leveling tool.
Setting up a ATA HD password with a selfencrypting ssd like the intel 520 series will securly encrypt all data and you wont be able to read or write to the drive without the password. the drive cannot be pluged into another computer and be accessed there. It will show up as a locked drive until you enter the correct ATA master- or user password. you wont even be able to secure erase the drive without a password - better don't loose it or you have to dump your drive. However, your mainburd has to support ATA HD security. That is a still little hard to find...
this is also not what the article you reffere to (SandForce SSD Encryption - Demystified) is stating. the articel you reffered to was mainly questioning the security of such a "black box" solution in spite of an open source solution like truecrypt. The article is also quite old.
to get a clearer view of how it actually works see the document:
##hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/F08FCD6C41A7A3FF8625735400620E6A/$file/HowToGuide_BulkDataE ncryption_final.pdf
It seems to be just a logical step to use ondisk encryption whenever possible with a SSD since SSDs loose up to 80% performance if you use truecrypt.
@Bill: Yes, ATA HD encryption is sufficient for personal or corporate use.
Best
Bjoern
From your comments, my understanding is that if my motherboard supports ATA Security, I can set a password that is unrelated to the BiOS password and is not stored in the BIOS. Correct?
One other question, if my motherboard does NOT support ATA Security, can the Intel toolkit be used to set the SSD ATA password? Do I then continue to use the toolkit to provide the password and enable access?
1.) Yes. The PW will be hashed and the hash will be saved in the drive. the PW can then be used to decrypted the key used for the encryption of the data on the drive itself. You can also use the drive in another computer supporting ATA security - at least if it is the same mainboard and therefore BIOS implementation of ATA security.
2.) If your BIOS does not support ATA security there is no way to use a password protected disk. the disk would be locked - without a supporting BIOS you cannot enter the password. Most systems would not even boot with a locked drive on any SATA channel. that is also the reason why you cannot set the password using the intel toolkit. imagin you would set a password in windows and then be unable to access your system anymore, because your bios actualy does not support it.
Therefore, the entire handling of the password is quite uncomfortable and you have a risk of loosing your hardware. allways remember - if you loose the password you loose not only the data but also the drive itself. It would be bricked forever.