In the early days of SSDs, Intel was one of the biggest players, mostly thanks to the X-25M, which offered a significant step up in quality from a lot of other solid state products at the time. Since then, the company has retreated a little and, like many other brands, often relies on thirdparty SandForce controllers. Intel has a strong focus on expensive enterprise-level SSDs, of course, but it still has an interest in the consumer market, and the Intel name alone still carries a lot of weight.
With that caveat in mind, the 730 is still the top-end Intel consumer SSD at the moment, and it seems the company is now moving back to using its own controllers. The 730 is built using 20nm Micron 2-bit MLC NAND, with a 600MHz PC29AS21CA0 controller, which has been taken directly from the DC3700 enterprise SSD.
Power-loss protection and a parity-based redundancy system are built in, giving the 730 a fair bit of resilience. The drive’s endurance is rated at 50GB a day for the 240GB model and 70GB a day for the 480GB drive, both for a reasonable five years of use.
However, the 730 shows one of the largest variances in performance between different capacities of all the drive series we tested, in synthetic tests at least. Both the 480GB and 240GB drives manage a slightly disappointing 484MB/sec in CrystalDiskMark, but AS SSD reports quicker speeds of 524MB/sec and 517MB/sec respectively.
When writing, though, the 240GB model drops right near the bottom of the charts, managing just 270MB/sec in AS SSD – a disappointing showing compared with Samsung’s 850 Evo 250GB, which managed 499.6MB/sec. The 480GB model fares much better, with performance hovering around 477MB/sec.
Meanwhile, when it comes to random reads and writes, the 730 is in the middle of the chart, with respectable results, which is fine, but it equally shows that the 730 isn’t the top performer.
Likewise, its IOPS performance isn’t the worst we’ve seen, but it isn’t particularly high either, especially for the 240GB drive, which only managed 32,894 IOPS.
Once again, though, our focus is on realworld performance from traces of major applications, and the 730 does fine here, with the 480GB model coming first in the Microsoft Word test, admittedly only by 0.1 seconds. It does well in the Battlefield 3 trace too, coming second only to Samsung’s drives, with a score of 132.9 seconds for the 480GB drive and 133.2 for the 240GB model.
It’s safe to conclude that the 730 offers perfectly fine real-world performance, then, but we wouldn’t recommend it. It’s the most expensive drive in this Labs, with the 240GB model costing almost the same amount as Crucial’s 500GB BX100, which performs better in some tests. Costing 62p per gigabyte for the 240GB 730, and 56p for the 480GB drive, the prices are like those from yesteryear, ignoring the steady drop in SSD prices. Since nearly all of the other SSDs we’ve tested in this Labs perform almost as well, but don’t cost as much, we’d choose them every time over the 730.
Conclusion
Our single wish for Intel’s next-generation consumer SSDs is more realistic pricing. Crack that, and Intel will again have a product worth recommending. Otherwise, there’s nothing special about the 730 and nothing to justify its higher costs. For now, we’d consider a Crucial or Samsung drive instead.
VERDICT
Reasonable real-world performance, but the prices are simply too high to make these drives worth considering over the competition.
OVERALL SCORES
INTEL SSD 730 240GB – 67
INTEL SSD 730 480GB – 73
