Specifications, Pricing and Availability

First let's look at the 335 Series specs on its own and then compare the new drive to the 330 and 520 Series.

Intel was very conservative on the spec list. An example of their conservatism was the rated sequential read performance. Intel claims 500MB/s, but in our testing with ATTO, the standard for rating sequential performance was nearly 558MB/s. The same was true in nearly every category on the spec sheet.

Here we see the breakdown of three Intel consumer SSDs - 330, 335 and 520. 20nm flash does significantly change one area for the better, and that's power consumption. The 335 with 20nm flash has an idle power consumption of just 275mW.

For most notebook users, the idle power consumption is the most important category to have a very lower value in since your SSD is idle more than it's moving data. Both the idle and active power is reduced by more than half. We're testing Intel's power today in our new power tests later in this review.

At the time of writing Newegg had all three of the drives we're comparing on this page in stock. Both the 330 and 335 240GB were available for $199.99. The Intel 520 240GB was $249.99, all SSD pricing taken from full retail box versions. All three drives ship with the same accessory kits, but the 330 and 335 have three year warranties and the 520 has a five year warranty.