Intel SSD 525 Review (240GB)

The mSATA SSD space has been heating up over the past year as Ultrabooks and other small form factor devices like Intel’s NUC have continued to grow in popularity. While mostly a placeholder until M.2 (formerly NGFF) SSDs show up on the market, mSATA drives are currently the only solution if you need a standardized small form factor 6Gbps SATA SSD.

Due to physical limitations, the largest mSATA SSDs on the market today are still 240/256GB as there’s only room for 4 NAND packages (8 x 8GB die per package). The transition to 128Gbit NAND die will double this to 480/512GB so I’d expect that limit to be broken in the next quarter or two.

Although there are capacity limitations, there are no real performance limitations to delivering an mSATA SSD. As we found in our review of Micron’s mSATA C400, you can deliver the same performance as a 2.5” SSD in the mSATA form factor. It’s a pretty amazing thing to think about. You get more performance out of a tiny mSATA SSD than out of a stack of 10K RPM hard drives.

Intel has been dabbling in the mSATA space for a while now. Until Monday the fastest mSATA SSD Intel made was based on Intel’s first controller technology, but earlier this week that all changed with the announcement of the Intel SSD 525.

Read on for our full review of the 525!