Intel 525 Series mSATA SSD Review: Five Capacities Tested

Anvil Storage Utilities

Version and / or Patch Used: RC5

So what is Anvil Storage Utilities? First of all, it's a storage benchmark for SSDs and HDDs where you can check and monitor your performance. The Standard Storage Benchmark performs a series of tests, you can run a full test or just the read or the write test or you can run a single test, i.e. 4K DQ16.

Anvil Storage Utilities is not officially available yet but we've been playing with the beta for several months now. The author, Anvil on several international forums has been updating the software steadily and is adding new features every couple of months.

The software is used several different ways and to show different aspects for each drive. We've chosen to use this software to show the performance of a drive with two different data sets. The first is with compressible data and the second data set is incompressible data. Several users have requested this data in our SSD reviews.

QD32 Random Read

Here we scale IOPS by queue depth. Companies like to talk about their maximum IOPS performance and many new SSDs achieve near 100K IOPS when reading and writing. Desktop computers and notebooks rarely get to high queue depths so the IOPS performance we should really be concerned about comes from lower queue depths.

QD32 Random Write

Only a few of our mSATA drives have ran this test so only a few made it to the chart. The Intel 525 Series does well in both tests and the performance scales as the drive sizes increase.