Intel 530 240GB SSD Review

Anvil Storage Utilities

Version and / or Patch Used: RC6

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, has been steadily updating the software on several international forums, 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.

0-Fill Compressible Data

Incompressible Data

The SF-2281 controller compresses all data that it can in real-time before writing it to the flash. This makes the 530 Series write incompressible data a little slower than compressible data, since the latter shrinks the data written to the flash.

Read IOPS through Queue Depth Scale

Here, we start to see the 530 lose a lot of ground to the newest SSD products on the market.

Scaling Write IOPS through Queue Scale

The write IOPS performance remains high, but most of the people purchasing low-cost SSDs need read performance more than high write performance.