Being the world’s largest maker of motherboards and one of the world’s largest producers of PC hardware in general, Asus supplies almost everything imaginable, from humble mouse mats to large-format displays. But there are a few things that are missing in Asus’s portfolio; among them are solid-state drives. But it looks like the company will fill this gap real soon.

The company posted a teaser with its ROG Strix SQ7 drive over on its Taiwanese Facebook page on Saturday, just weeks ahead of the looming Computex 2022 trade show. The ROG Strix SQ7 will contend with the best SSDs today.

The teaser does not mention detailed technical specifications of the product but only says that this is a 1TB M.2-2280 drive with a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface that is ‘coming soon.’ Additionally, the drive comes with a simplistic graphene heat spreader to fit into desktops, laptops, and potentially the Sony's latest PlayStation 5 console.

The rather simplistic graphene heat spreader is not an indicator of anything. It can hide a modest mid-range turnkey SSD solution or a custom high-performance drive with a proprietary controller and firmware (Samsung’s top-of-the-range 980 Pro client SSD comes with a graphene heat spreader, for example). Given that this is Asus’s first hooray into internal SSDs, we believe it is reasonable to assume that the company is using a turnkey solution, yet with some customizations to justify the Asus ROG branding. Meanwhile, a 1TB capacity indicates that Asus wants to address the sweet spot of the gaming SSD market.

Virtually all leading gaming hardware makers (Gigabyte, MSI, to name a few) started to offer SSDs in recent years. Of course, it is a risky business as SSD costs and prices fluctuate because of fluctuating 3D NAND prices, and competition is cutthroat. Still, you get a steady revenue stream from loyal customers and additional exposure to your brand as a reward.

Enthusiasts who buy leading-edge hardware, such as platforms based on Intel’s 12th Generation Alder Lake processors, eagerly await SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. Unfortunately, these SSD platforms will not be ready for prime time for some time, so Asus is proceeding with a PCIe Gen4 drive. After all, the first product is always a test, so why not go with a proven platform?

When you think of ECC (error correction code) memory, Kingston, Samsung, or Crucial are probably the first brands that cross your mind. There's an overabundance of memory vendors, but very few do business in the ECC market. Some may not know it, but Mushkin is one of the handful of companies that commercialize ECC memory kits, and it has some pretty good ones.

Mushkin advertises the Redline ECC Black DDR4-3600 as the world's first overclocked ECC memory kit, and that is true. However, ECC memory isn't prevalent outside the enterprise market, and manufacturers generally stick to JEDEC specifications, such as DDR4-2133, or some vendors even go up to DDR4-3200. Therefore, a DDR4-3600 ECC memory kit is undoubtedly a configuration you don't often see on the memory market. It does come in handy, though, given that AMD's Ryzen has always supported ECC and Intel has unlocked ECC memory support for its mainstream Alder Lake processors (provided you use a motherboard with the W680 chipset).

The Redline ECC memory modules come with a green PCB, which might be a letdown for some enthusiasts. Given that ECC memory primarily dwells in servers and workstations, the color of the PCB shouldn't be an issue for the majority of customers. However, a black PCB could have gone a long way with potential mainstream buyers looking to take advantage of Alder Lake or Ryzen's support for ECC memory. The Redline ECC checks in with a height of 38mm (1.5 inches), so it's friendly with most oversized CPU air coolers.

Mushkin equipped the Redline ECC with a lightweight aluminum heat spreader, which the brand calls Frostbyte. Unlike the company's other memory, the Redline ECC only comes in black or white. In addition, the heat spreader's top resembles a double helix, which looks pretty cool.

The Redline ECC Black arrives as a dual-channel memory kit with two 16GB memory modules. Each memory module has an eight-layer PCB and adheres to a single-rank design. Although Thaiphoon Burner couldn't pick up the integrated circuits (ICs) manufacturer, we suspect they're from Micron, given the single-rank structure and loose timings.

The memory modules run at DDR4-2666 at 19-19-19-43 natively. However, the XMP profile will configure them for DDR4-3600 with 16-19-19-39 timings and a 1.4V DRAM voltage. The required voltage is a bit high considering that there are DDR4-3600 memory kits with better timings at 1.35V. See our PC Memory 101 feature and How to Shop for RAM story for more on timings and frequency considerations.

Comparison Hardware

The Intel system employs the Intel Core i9-10900K and Asus ROG Maximus XII Apex, which operates on the 0901 firmware. On the opposite side, the AMD system consists of the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and the Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero. The latter is on the 3501 firmware. The MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Gaming Trio ensures no bottlenecks in our gaming RAM benchmarks.

Intel Performance

The Redline ECC Black ended up in the middle of the Intel application performance chart. The memory flaunted its muscle in the Microsoft Office workload. We doubt there will be widespread use of ECC memory in gaming systems. Nonetheless, the memory surprised us as it managed to take fourth place overall in our gaming benchmarks. 

AMD Performance

The AMD platform turned out to be the Redline ECC Black's Achilles heel. We observed a decline in overall application performance that found Mushkin's memory in the penultimate position. The memory kit didn't shine in any specific workload, either. Gaming performance was a tad worse than on the Intel platform.

Overclocking and Latency Tuning

It was hard to squeeze a hefty overclock out of the Redline ECC Black since the XMP voltage was already at 1.4V. However, upping the DRAM voltage to 1.45V quickly put us at DDR4-3800 with the exact rated timings for DDR4-3600.

Lowest Stable Timings

Being Micron ICs, we couldn't get the timings very low, even at 1.45V. We got the tRCD, tRP, and tRAS as low as 18-18-38 before the memory became unstable. The CAS Latency remained at 16 clock cycles.

Bottom Line

Mushkin used a single-rank design for the Redline ECC Black DDR4-3600 C16 memory modules, which affects the memory's performance on the Intel platform and has an even bigger impact on the AMD platform. It's a shame because the memory would have performed better if Mushkin had opted for a dual-rank structure. As a result, the Redline ECC Black DDR4-3600 C16 kit cannot compete against enthusiast-grade memory kits like the G.Skill Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600 C16.

Mushkin's memory kit currently retails for $236.50. Yes, it's a bit more expensive than your standard DDR4-3600 C16 memory kit, and we expected that since it's ECC memory, after all. However, the Redline ECC Black DDR4-3600 C16 certainly has a spot in the market, offering enthusiasts an ECC option that's better than the standard ECC memory at DDR4-2133 or DDR4-2666 with sloppy timings.

Mushkin is an American company known for its memory products, including DRAM and SSDs, USB flash drives, and memory cards. Outside of the realm of enthusiasts, most of their existing drives aren't particularly well-known, though the Pilot-E was a popular choice at 2TB for some time because it traded blows with ADATA’s SX8200 Pro and the popular HP EX950. Mushkin’s upcoming Vortex also looks promising. 

As the naming convention suggests, the Mushkin Delta sits beside its Alpha and Gamma lines. All three use Phison SSD controllers, a popular source for controllers, with the Alpha using the popular E12S, the Delta coming with the faster E16, and the Gamma coming with the fastest E18. The Alpha and Delta use QLC flash that trades off endurance and performance for better capacity and cost, while the Gamma comes with TLC flash that's typically the faster alternative.

Phison was an early adopter of the PCIe 4.0 interface for AMD’s X570 chipset launch, and the E16 has found popularity recently. Prices for E16-powered SSDs have come down, and these drives have found new life as a suitable budget choice for the PlayStation 5, even when coupled with QLC flash. Many drives share this hardware, so if you’re someone who may be tempted to grab something similar, consider this more of a blanket review.

Specifications

The Mushkin Delta is rated for up to 4,975/3,975 MBps of sequential read/write throughput and up to 700K/650K random read/write IOPS. The drive comes in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB flavors, which is unsurprising as this drive is based on QLC flash. Availability for this drive is hit and miss at the moment, but you can find the smaller SKUs at around $0.12 a gigabyte. The 4TB’s MSRP is also around this range. Unfortunately, this price is higher than some competing products.

Endurance is also fairly typical for QLC flash — the drive can absorb 200 TB of data per TB of capacity. Most users will probably not write this much data, but the ratings are low for those expecting the typically high endurance that comes with Phison controllers. It’s nice to see a five-year warranty, though. Of course, drives from competitors should share these characteristics, so this is simply a baseline.

Software and Accessories

This drive comes packaged alone. You'll need to use free software to clone your existing drive.

A Closer Look

The Mushkin Delta has a somewhat attractive top label, if that’s your thing, and the back one lists basic information such as the model number and capacity.

Here we have the venerable Phison PS5016-E16, or E16, SSD controller, which is ostensibly a mid-range PCIe 4.0 design. This controller leverages eight channels and supports DRAM. Entry-level designs will usually lack DRAM and have lower performance in sequential workloads due to the quad-channel design, while the higher-end options can push the interface's limits.

The SK hynix DDR4 DRAM is labeled H5AN4G8NBJR. The “4G8N” tells us these are 4Gb packages in an 8-bit configuration (512MB). As there is another package on the back, the total DRAM capacity weighs in at 1GB. This is surprisingly ample and good to see.

The flash is labeled IA5BG66AWA, so it's 96-layer Micron QLC. These are 1Tb dies, meaning the drive has two per package. So the drive has two packages on each side, for a total of four. This QLC was a bit of a last hurrah for Intel and Micron’s cooperation, and we’re beginning to see better QLC from all manufacturers, for example, Intel’s 144-layer flash in the 670p. We will see 176-layer QLC this year from Micron and Solidigm (Intel's newly-sold SSD business). 

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Comparison Products

We compare the Mushkin Delta 1TB to other popular PCIe 4.0 drives, including Western Digital’s SN770 and SN850, Samsung’s 980 Pro, Crucial’s P5 Plus, the Corsair MP600 Pro, the original Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus, and lastly, the MSI Spatium M470. These are drives based on TLC flash, but we do have the DRAM-less SN770. In addition, the M470 uses the E16 SSD controller like the Delta, albeit with TLC flash.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities, including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

Unsurprisingly, the Delta finished last in all of the 3DMark tests. Of particular note is the higher latency, which is hard to avoid with this QLC flash.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The Delta scores poorly again, particularly in latency metrics. Phison’s controllers have good peak performance but can do worse in PCMark than others, as we see with the M470, Rocket 4.0 Plus, and MP600 Pro (the latter two come with the E18 SSD controller).

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

This bandwidth-limited benchmark inevitably has the Delta falling behind, although it gets close to the M470 during read workloads as it hits the limitations of the controller. This type of performance is not too important, even with the PS5, but it is useful for those who do a lot of file transfers. Sequential performance may be more useful for DirectStorage when it goes mainstream, but it’s likely better drives will exist by then with better all-around specifications.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The E18 SSD controller really takes off here in ATTO and reaches its peak performance. Additionally, we see the DRAM-less SN770 finally falling behind. The Delta is in-line with the M470 but falls behind faster PCIe 4.0 drives. The Delta’s sequential performance in Crystal Disk Mark leaves much to be desired, but this is largely a limitation of the controller during read workloads where it comes close to the M470 and SN770 at higher queue depths (WD). The QLC drive struggles more with write data.

Latency during random work is actually not bad, although these drives do rely on a pSLC mode for write workloads. The QLC is overwhelmed at high QD with write data and also with read requests. QLC flash inherently reads slower than TLC, although Intel pioneered many mechanisms to improve read performance starting with this generation. Future generations of QLC, including Intel’s existing 144-layer flash, have further improvements. Still, the M470’s results expose some of the E16 controller's limitations.

High QD read performance may become more important as DirectStorage matures, although likely with block sizes larger than 4KB. However, sustained reads may also become more useful, which would make upcoming QLC (144- or 176-layer and up from the major manufacturers) a better choice than this. This is because while QLC's sustained write performance has remained feeble, the various flash makers are pushing improvements to independent read performance.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The Mushkin Delta 1TB writes at a maximum speed of around 2 GBps for approximately 125 seconds, suggesting a cache capacity of about 250GB. This behavior suggests the drive uses all of its QLC capacity in SLC mode, thus reducing the overall capacity to one-fourth the normal. After that, speeds fall below 130 MBps. The slow folding state is forced into action because the drive must free up and convert SLC to QLC to regain the necessary capacity.

These slow write speeds in sustained workloads are not unusual with QLC drives and, further, drives with very large SLC caches also tend to have lower performance in sustained workloads. The Delta will not do well with this type of workload, especially when it is fuller and the dynamic SLC cache shrinks. Luckily, this is not super important for read-heavy gaming workloads or general use. As we see on other E16 drives like the M470, the cache recovers relatively quickly.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade, as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Remember that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

The Delta is not particularly efficient, which is understandable because it takes longer to complete a transfer. The E16 SSD controller is also somewhat to blame (as we see with the M470’s results), but the QLC also holds this drive back.

According to the SMART reading, the Delta idled at 42C and peaked at 65C. In contrast, the temperature gun measured these higher at 53C and 85C, respectively. The drive did not fully throttle during a 400GB data transfer, but it appeared to be pushing the edge. This drive is not meant for sustained write workloads, so it shouldn't throttle under normal circumstances. However, a heatsink is a good general recommendation for a PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

The Phison E16 controller was an early consumer PCIe 4.0 design that arrived a bit too expensive. Over time, PCIe 4.0-capable motherboards have become more available, and many more manufacturers have jumped aboard the PCIe 4.0 train. We now have newer, faster controllers in smaller process nodes and better flash. Even the newer DRAM-less designs have proved to be beyond adequate for almost all users.

However, drives built around the E16 have become popular as prices have decreased. The PS5 works adequately with such a drive in its SSD expansion slot, making the E16 a budget option there as well. Even when paired with QLC flash, the E15 controller can deliver up to 5 GBps of sequential read throughput at 2TB. This makes the combination attractive as read throughput is the most important factor for the PS5, and, ostensibly, QLC flash is cheaper than TLC. However, 96-layer QLC must inevitably fade into the distance as newer types of flash arrive.

The combination of the E16 with this QLC flash does tend to disappoint, particularly at 1TB. Other PCIe 4.0 drives outperform it in just about every metric, especially during write workloads. Capacity can be attractive, but the 4TB SKU is hard to find, and the competition is stiff otherwise. Although pricing for PCIe 4.0 drives has come down, it’s hard to recommend the Delta over even halfway decent PCIe 3.0 drives unless you need that peak bandwidth. The Gamma's simple design is a plus, though, as this technology is mature and straightforward.

Nevertheless, the E16 is not a bad controller, and the presence of DRAM lifts it above many of the other older options. The flash is better than earlier 64-layer QLC, and, quite frankly, we don’t see 96-layer generational QLC from other manufacturers outside of Samsung’s 870 QVO. The E16's robust SLC caching scheme means most people may never know the difference between other, faster drives. This really just leaves the Delta, or a similar competitor drive, with some niche use for the PS5 if and when it can be found cheap enough.

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Mushkin has introduced its new high-performance lineup of SSDs aimed at gamers and other performance-hungry users. The new Vortex Redline drives not only offer an up to 7415 MB/s sequential read speed (which makes it one of the industry's fastest PCIe 4.0 x4 drives capable of competing against the best SSDs available), but also come with a slim graphene heat spreader that allow installation of these devices into laptops. 

That rated speed compares favorably with the 7,000 MBps sequential rates for popular PCIe 4.0 SSDs such as the Samsung 980 Pro and Kingston KC3000. Of course, we'll have to see how it stacks up in real-world testing.

Set to be available in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB configurations, Mushkin's Vortex Redline is based on the InnoGrit Rainer IG5236 controller (multi-core, NVMe 1.4, eight NAND channels, up to 1200 MT/s NAND interface, 3W, 12nm) paired with 3D TLC NAND memory. The drives come in an M.2-2280 form-factor, feature a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, and are equipped with an ultra-thin graphene heat spreader.  

When it comes to performance, Mushkin's engineers have managed to squeeze every bit of performance promised by the InnoGrit IG5236 controller and then some. Mushkin's Vortex Redline 2TB SSD is rated for up to 7415 MB/s sequential read speed, up to 6800 MB/s sequential write speed, 730K random read IOPS, and up to 1,130K random write IOPS. Lower capacity drives are somewhat slower, but are also very fast.  

Mushkin's Vortex Redline SSDs

As for endurance, not everything is that rosy. The drives are designed for 0.26 ~ 0.27 drive writes per day (DWPD) over a five-year warranty period, which is in line with inexpensive SSDs, but which is lower when compared to other premium solid-state storage devices. 

Some might argue that Mushkin is a bit late with its top-of-the-range PCIe 4.0 x4 drives as owners of Intel's Alder Lake-based systems are either waiting for SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface or have already acquired a premium PCIe Gen4 SSD. For obvious reasons, Mushkin would probably have liked to introduce its Vortex Redline earlier, but enthusiast-grade PCIe Gen5 drives are months away (some expect them to arrive in Q3, other talk about Q4), so enthusiasts building AMD-based AM4 and Intel-powered LGA1700 systems today could certainly use Mushkin's drives that promise higher performance than competing solutions. 

Perhaps the sweetest part about Mushkin's Vortex Redline SSDs is their pricing: a 512GB model carries a $77.89 MSRP, whereas a 1TB SKU has a recommended price of $124.99, reports TechPowerUp. Both MSRPs are lower when compared to Samsung's 980 Pro SSDs.

Built with a tried-and-true PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD controller and TLC flash, Seagate's IronWolf 525 aims to be a top pick for our list of best SSDs if you're looking to upgrade your NAS with a speedy SSD volume, or if you choose to go the caching or tiering route to maximize overall capacity. NAS SSDs are great for commercial use and can help avid data hoarders speed up access to their files, especially if they hoard more diverse file types than 'just' video. 

PCIe 4.0-enabled and designed to handle demanding multi-user environments by delivering low latency during intensive workloads, Seagate's IronWolf 525 stacks up to be an overkill companion for most personal NAS devices. The drive is built to last, too, with a 0.7 drive writes per day (DWPD) endurance rating paired with a five-year warranty and three years of Rescue Data Recovery Services. As a result, it's ready for almost any workload you can throw its way, but it is costly and not quite enterprise-grade.

Specifications

Seagate’s IronWolf 525 is available in popular capacities of 500GB up to 2TB. The drives are expensive, though, with similar or even higher price points than the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs we’ve tested, weighing in at roughly $0.20-0.26 per gigabyte at the time of publishing.

The high price point is somewhat justified — Seagate backs the IronWolf 525 with solid write endurance ratings of up to 1,400TB per terabyte of capacity within its five-year warranty, which is more than double the Samsung 980 Pro. Seagate also includes a robust three-year Rescue Data Recovery Service Plan for the IronWolf 525 alongside the standard five-year warranty. So if your drive fails within the plan’s coverage, you can go ahead and send it in for an attempt at data recovery.

Seagate rates the IronWolf 525 to deliver sequential read/write speeds of up to 5.0/4.4 GBps and up to 760,000/700,000 random read/write IOPS in best-case scenarios. However, Seagate also rates the IronWolf 525’s performance in worst-case sustained scenarios, too. When tasked with heavy read/write streams, the IronWolf 525 can sustain speeds of up to 4,450/965 MBps read/write and up to 445,000/19,500 random read/write IOPS.

The IronWolf 525 supports Trim, secure erase (Format NVM command), S.M.A.R.T. data reporting, and for security, it supports AES-256 encryption, but it is not a Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) which requires encryption key management on top of an AES-256 encryption engine. As such, the IronWolf 525 is only TCG-pyrite (non-SED) compliant, not TCG OPAL compliant.

Software

Furthermore, the Seagate IronWolf 525 has various software support including SeaTools to diagnose and monitor the SSDs and a free-to-use version of Acronis True Image called DiscWizard to clone your data to your new Seagate SSD within a Windows environment.

When installed into a compatible NAS system, you can utilize IronWolf Health Management (IHM) to monitor your system and offer preventative actions to secure your data if issues arise. This software is accessible via most NAS providers’ storage managers including Asustor, QNAP, QSAN, Synology, Thecus, and TerraMaster.

A Closer Look

Seagate's IronWolf 525 comes in an M.2 2280 double-sided form factor at all capacities and features a tasteful black PCB, unlike older generation SSDs. Similar to our experience with the new WD Blue SN570, the front label design on our sample does not match some of the images of the SSD in the company's marketing documents, but that's a minor consideration given that it will be hidden in your NAS.

interestingly, the company went as far as to write “CAUTION HOT SURFACE” in bold text on the label. You'll see why in the power tests on the following page. 

Underneath the label lies Phison's eight-channel PS5016-E16 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 controller. This controller's PCIe 4.0 interface powers past the best PCIe 3.0 SSDs in sequential workloads, but because it is heavily based on the Phison E12's architecture, it is not quite as potent as Phison's newer E18 controller that ships in the Seagate FireCuda 530, or competing SSDs with homegrown controllers like the Samsung 980 Pro or WD Black SN850. 

The E18 features a multi-core architecture with two ARM Cortex-R5 primary cores clocked at 733MHz, a dual-core co-processor (CoXProcessor 2.0), and dedicated DRAM for storing metadata. Features like end-to-end data protection, power state management, and thermal throttling capability are supported. In addition, the Phison 4th-Gen LDPC ECC engine ensures data integrity. 

Seagate outfitted our 2TB IronWolf 525 sample with two 8Gb SK hynix’s DDR4 chips, one on each side. Our sample also has thirty-two dies of Kioxia’s BiCS4 96-Layer TLC flash. Each die is 512Gb and features a dual-plane architecture, half that of the latest BiCS5 112-Layer TLC shipping in competing SSDs. Seagate overprovisions the flash by roughly 10% for bad block management and garbage collection, among other background tasks. 

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Comparison Products

Today we put the 2TB Seagate IronWolf 525 against the Best SSDs on the market. For PCIe 4.0 competition, we threw in the Seagate FireCuda 530, WD_Black SN850, and Mushkin Gamma. We also threw in PCIe 3.0 comparisons, including the SK hynix Gold P31, Samsung 970 EVO Plus, Team Group T-Create Expert, and WD_Black SN750.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

Seagate's FireCuda 530 and the WD Black SN850 delivered the fastest results in this benchmark, but Seagate's IronWolf 525 performed very well even though it is limited by its 5.0/4.4 GBps of bandwidth. 

This test isn't relevant to a NAS use-case, but it is part of our standard test suite and does show how the drive performs in sporadic, bursty workloads. Obviously, Seagate's IronWolf 525 wasn't designed for gaming, but it managed third place. We have tests that will give us a better indication of performance with different file types below. 

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The IronWolf 525 wasn’t quite as responsive as its PCIe 4.0-equipped competition in these application workloads, but it still beats most of the PCIe 3.0 competitors. However, Team Group’s SM2262EN powered T-Create Expert managed to gain the edge here.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

Slower than the Samsung 970 EVO Plus and SK hynix Gold P31, the IronWolf 525 delivered weak copy performance, at least for a PCIe 4.0 SSD. Its read performance proved a bit better, however, exceeding the performance of the PCIe 3.0-equipped SSDs by roughly 30%.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The Seagate IronWolf 525 delivered solid sequential results, but it wasn't as fast as the other PCIe 4.0 SSDs. It also lagged the competition a bit in low-QD random performance, scoring sixth place in our random read test at a queue depth (QD) of 1. 

However, after scaling up to QD256, the IronWolf 525 displayed fantastic agility under high pressure and dished out roughly 750,000/1,000,000 random read/write IOPS.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

Interestingly, the IronWolf's dynamic SLC behavior varied when pressured with sustained writes. Rather than having a fully dynamic cache that spans one-third of the available capacity, or a small cache like the one found on the Spatium M470, the IronWolf 525's cache was unlike any we have seen from this hardware layout. Seagate's IronWolf 525 SLC caching is dynamic and adjusts based on use.

After hammering it with iometer, the IronWolf 525 absorbed 70GB before degrading from roughly 4.4GBps to 990MBps for the remainder of the test. However, that was just the first pass. During a few of the following write passes, the IronWolf 525's appetite became ferocious, gobbling down roughly 175GB of data before write speed degraded. It was also fairly quick to recover after each idle round, taking roughly 5 minutes to recover 175GB of cache space.

Power Consumption & Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best Ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Remember that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

Seagate’s IronWolf 525 consumed quite a bit of power at idle and under load, which led to a second to last place efficiency ranking. Without airflow in our 23 degree Celsius lab, the IronWolf 525’s high power draw led to high idle temperatures on our open-air test bench, measuring in the mid-50s. The Seagate IronWolf 525 began to throttle after roughly 500GB of data was written and the drive reached 83 degrees Celsius. We recommend ensuring adequate cooling if you use the SSD for heavy workloads. 

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

Seagate's IronWolf 525 is a faster alternative to its IronWolf 510 and delivers the performance we would expect given its hardware. However, like the recently reviewed MSI Spatium M470, the IronWolf 525 is limited by its older controller. This means its performance lands somewhere between both the best PCIe 3.0 SSDs and PCIe 4.0 SSDs, but it is also a bit inefficient and runs a bit hot without adequate cooling. The company even went as far as to write "CAUTION HOT SURFACE" in bold text on the label.

Although not built for gaming, the IronWolf 525 still delivered responsive performance in 3DMark's Storage Benchmark, which was a pleasant surprise. It also delivered solid results in PCMark 10's Full System Drive Benchmark despite the lower-than-average random 4KB QD1 performance. 

With sustained write speeds of nearly 1GBps and burst speeds of up to 5GBps, the IronWolf 525 will deliver solid performance in NAS applications, especially PCIe 4.0-equipped NAS outfitted with multiple 10GbE ports.

If it weren't for the robust endurance rating and three years of Rescue Data Recovery Services, however, Seagate's IronWolf 525 would find itself in an awkward position due to its high price point. For the average user, the cost of the larger capacities is simply out of their league. 

The Seagate IronWolf 525 is currently listed at roughly $80-$130 more than the Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850 at 2TB, but to be fair, they lack the endurance and warranty backing.

However, the WD Red SN700 is the IronWolf's more direct competitor. Although it's 'only' a PCIe 3.0 SSD, the WD Red is significantly cheaper at roughly $150 for 2TB, and it still offers plenty of performance and endurance for most NAS applications. Between the two of them, it's hard to say which is better until we review the Red SN700 (which will be soon), but the Red looks to be a better value in terms of price per gigabyte.

The Seagate IronWolf 525's robust warranty, high bandwidth PCIe 4.0 interface, high endurance ratings, and high cost positions it best for small office applications or for those prosumers who see the value in potential data rescue recovery services. If you're on the search for a new NAS SSD for caching, tiering, or just for the sake of simply creating a fast network share on its own, the IronWolf 525 is a solid but costly solution worth considering.

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Team Group has an SSD for almost any use case, from high-capacity SATA to high-endurance and high-performance M.2 NVMe drives. But for those in search of a fast PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD for a gaming console or desktop rig, Team Group’s T-Force Cardea A440 is a great option. It performs well and looks great, although it is on the pricey side.

Powered by Phison’s E18 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD controller and paired with Micron’s 96L TLC flash, the T-Force Cardea A440 can dish out up to 7/6.9GBps read/write, but it isn’t going to be quite as responsive as the recently reviewed Corsair MP600 Pro XT or the Seagate FireCuda 530.

Interestingly, the Cardea A440 comes with two of the company’s patented heatsinks, one a slim profile graphene and copper label for tight fits and the other designed for desktop users who want maximum cooling.

The company states that both heatsinks are compatible with the PS5, although the larger aluminum heatsink will prevent you from reinstalling on the M.2 slot’s lid. But based on our testing, the lid actually hurts cooling performance, resulting in higher operating temperatures when under load. While more dust may accumulate over time with the metal cover off, as long as you’re diligent with your dust maintenance, that’s unlikely to cause a serious issue.

Specifications

Team Group’s T-Force Cardea A440 is available in 1TB and 2TB capacities, each priced as low as $0.16 per gigabyte. The A440’s Sequential performance is rated for up to 7.0/6.9 GBps read/write, and it can deliver up to 650,000/700,000 random read/write IOPS at both capacities. Like most other drives in its class, the Cardea features an SLC cache that will degrade once you exceed its capacity threshold. The A440’s isn’t capable of sustaining its write performance until full, but is still well equipped to handle the requests of most gamers and general computing users for day-to-day tasks.

In a nod to PS5 owners, Team Group’s T-Force Cardea A440 comes backed by some high write endurance ratings within its five-year warranty. The 1TB model is rated for up to 700TB of writes, while the 2TB model is rated for twice that (1,400TB), partly due to Phison’s fourth-gen LDPC ECC. It also comes with S.M.A.R.T data reporting capability and Trim support. But it lacks OPAL-compliant AES 256-bit encryption for password protection.

Software and Accessories

Team Group supports the Cardea A440 with a basic SSD toolbox that can be used to monitor the device’s health status and benchmark the drive. As mentioned earlier, it comes with two heatsinks, the graphene label and a thicker aluminum heatsink, both ready to install rather than preinstalled, giving the buyer the option of using either option.

A Closer Look

The T-Force Cardea A440 comes in an M.2 2280 form factor and features a black PCB. With the graphene label applied, the A440 measures 3.7mm thick and weighs 13 grams. With the aluminum heatsink installed, the A440 measures 12.9mm thick and weighs in at 46 grams. The company claims that the heatsink will reduce temperatures by up to 20% with the heatsink and 9% with the graphene label.

Aesthetically, the A440 is very attractive with the aluminum heatsink, but we are not as pleased by the design of the graphene label. TW and CN patent numbers as well as the compliance symbols underneath distract from its premium appearance and price tag. This is something that could be easily remedied by moving them to the label on the backside of the PCB.

Powering this SSD to multi-gigabyte speeds is Phison’s PS5018-E18, the company’s best consumer eight-channel PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD controller to date. It’s built on a 12nm process and leverages three ARM Cortex R5 cores clocked at 1 GHz for its main compute, but it also takes advantage of a dual-core coprocessor to aid certain NAND firmware routines. The controller is NVMe 1.4 compliant and features end-to-end data path protection, thermal throttle support, Active State Power Management (ASPM), and Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) capability. 

The controller leverages a DRAM cache to store the FTL data, for faster processing of system requests than DRAM-less architectures. Our 2TB sample employs two SK hynix 8Gb DDR4 chips for this task, each clocked at 1,600 MHz. As for the flash, our A440 comes with 32 dies of Micron’s 512Gb 96L TLC, clocked at 1,200 MTps. This NAND flash features a quad-plane architecture, but still isn’t quite as speedy as Micron’s latest 176L replacement gate TLC that’s shipping in some competing SSDs.

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Comparison Products

We put Team Group’s T-Force Cardea A440 up against the Best SSDs on the market. These include the Seagate FireCuda 530, Samsung 980 Pro, WD Black SN850. We also threw in the Mushkin Gamma, Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000s, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, and Patriot Viper VP4300 for good measure.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

Hanging with many of the other Phison E18 NVMe-based SSDs in our test pool, the T-Force Cardea A440 delivered a fast total load time. It beat the Samsung 980 Pro and Patriot Viper VP4300, but both Seagate’s FireCuda 530 and WD Black SN850 proved a bit more responsive.  

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom dataset. We copy a 50GB dataset including 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

In terms of its file copy performance, the A440 scored average among its competition. It managed to outperform the WD Black SN850 and Patriot Viper VP4300 when copying our many test files and outperformed the Samsung 980 Pro in reading back our large .zip file.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Test

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The quick benchmark is more relatable to those who use their PCs for leisure or basic office work, while the full benchmark relates more to power users.

In PCMark 10, the A440 is one of the least-responsive in this group. It fell into last place after completing the Quick System Drive benchmark, but managed to outperform the InnoGrit-powered Patriot Viper VP4300 once tasked with the Full System Drive benchmark. 

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

Sequential performance scales well at most block sizes, with no dips like the ones seen from the non-Phison E18-based competitors. The T-Force Cardea A440 delivers fast random performance, but isn’t quite as responsive at a QD of 1 as the Seagate FireCuda 530 with its newer 176L TLC, nor the Samsung or WD drives.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

Team Group’s T-Force Cardea A440 leverages a large dynamic SLC cache. Our 2TB sample managed to absorb 225GB of data before degrading in performance from 6,850 MBps to 1,785 MBps. After writing an additional 1.44TB of data, the A440 degraded once more to an average write speed of 1,140 MBps until full. It’s SLC cache recovery was speedy though. Within only 1 minute of idle, the A440 recouped 172GB of its SLC cache.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

In terms of efficiency under load, the A440 lagged the competition, scoring last place on our chart. It consumed the most power out of all the other Phison E18 SSDs under load, but used the least amount of power at idle, roughly half that of the WD Black SN850 and Patriot Viper VP4300.  

Without installing either of the included heatsinks, the A440 displayed thermal throttling after writing roughly 260GB of data in a 24 degree Celsius environment. With the graphene label installed, the thermal throttle was delayed quite a bit, occurring after writing 470GB of data. Controller temperatures peaked around 70-80 degrees Celsius as reported by its S.M.A.R.T. data, depending on if you use the graphene label or not. With the aluminum heatsink installed, the drive can still throttle if your transfers exceed 900GB and your system runs fan-less but other than that, it should keep cool under even fairly heavy use.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

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Team Group’s T-Force Cardea A440 delivers high performance, similar to that of many other Phison E18 and Micron 96L TLC combinations we’ve reviewed. It isn’t the most responsive drive available, but is still very competitive in most circumstances. It traded blows with Samsung’s 980 Pro and the WD Black SN850, and easily outclassed the Patriot Viper VP4300. Seagate’s FireCuda 530, however, easily surpassed it in nearly every metric.

While the Seagate FireCuda 530 topped the A440 in testing, Seagate’s drive costs $120 more at the same capacity class. Even Corsair’s MP600 Pro XT with its heatsink and newer Micron 176L TLC as an alternative costs $125 more than the Team Group. For the average gamer, the T-Force Cardea A440 provides quite a value.

At the time of publishing, the A440 is one of the cheapest full-performance Gen4 SSDs you can get. It costs roughly $320 for the 2TB model, making it a bargain compared to Mushkin’s Gamma that’s also over $300, and it’s a whopping $80 cheaper than the Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000s. The WD Black SN850 is priced at just $20 more than the A440, and both the Samsung 980 Pro and Crucial P5 Plus are almost $40 more, making them a premium option.

With solid endurance ratings, a long warranty, and very competitive pricing, Team Group’s T-Force Cardea A440 is a great value for those with tougher-than-average workloads or those who want to outfit their new PS5 with some fast storage. With the included heatsinks it should remain cool under most workloads and stomp any SATA SSD any day of the week. 

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Admittedly, Mushkin had been absent from the memory game for a bit. Make no mistake, though, the brand is one of the veteran memory vendors, and now it's getting back into the game with a new series of DDR4 memory kits. The Redline Lumina lineup is designed for the latest Intel and AMD platforms with capacities spanning 16GB (2x8GB) to 64GB (2x32GB) and frequencies up to DDR4-4133, positioning Mushkin is to compete with the best RAM on the market.

Redline Lumina memory modules have a black PCB with a matching aluminum heat spreader. In addition, a silver strip with a diamond cut edge pattern helps highlight the heat spreader's black exterior. Unsurprisingly, the memory modules pridefully carry the Mushkin, Redline, and Lumina logos. 

The Redline Lumina is very compact, measuring 37.5mm (1.48 inches) tall, so we don't the Redline Lumina having any problems fitting underneath CPU air coolers. In addition, Mushkin offers users two ways to control the Redline Lumina's RGB illumination. You can use the included Mushkin RGB software or your motherboard's software. The memory is compatible with Asus Aura Sync, ASRock Polychrome, Gigabyte RGB Fusion, and MSI Mystic Light.

Each memory module is 16GB and features a single-rank design and an eight-layer PCB. Thaiphoon Burner couldn't detect the type of integrated circuits (ICs) Mushkin uses for the Redline Lumina DDR4-3600 C16. However, given the single-rank design, we suspect that the company is likely employing Micron ICs.

The Redline Lumina defaults to DDR4-2666 at 19-19-19-43. XMP 2.0 support is present; however, there's only one profile. The DDR4-3600 profile sets the timings to 16-19-19-39 and 1.4V. It's not a life-threatening voltage, but it will certainly put enthusiasts on edge, especially for a DDR4-3600 memory kit with loose timings. For more on timings and frequency considerations, see our PC Memory 101 feature, as well as our How to Shop for RAM story.

Comparison Hardware

The Intel system employs the Intel Core i9-10900K and Asus ROG Maximus XII Apex, which operates on the 0901 firmware. On the opposite side, the AMD system consists of the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and the Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero. The latter is on the 3501 firmware. The MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Gaming Trio takes care of the graphical RAM benchmarks, such as gaming.

Intel Performance

The memory kit ranged from second to last on the Intel application performance chart. The memory was only faster than the GeIL Orion AMD Edition DDR4-4266 C18. In terms of gaming performance, the memory kit landed in the middle of the pack.

AMD Performance

The Redline Lumina didn't take off on the AMD platform, either. Nonetheless, the memory kit improved its position just a little bit. It performed the best in the Microsoft Office workload where it was only behind the fastest memory kit by a hair.

Overclocking and Latency Tuning

Mushkin's memory kit hit a wall at DDR4-4100, which was very respectable for a DDR4-3600 memory kit. It already draws 1.4V at XMP, therefore, we upped the voltage to 1.45V for some headroom. It was easy getting to DDR4-4100, too. All we had to do was bump the CAS Latency (CL) from 16 up to 17 cycles.

Lowest Stable Timings

While the Redline Lumina was impressive in our overclocking tests, it wasn't very cooperative when we tried tightening its timings. At DDR4-3600 and 1.45V, the CL wouldn't go lower than 16 cycles. However, the tRCD, tRP and tRAS worked fine at 17-17-37.

Bottom Line

Single-rank 16GB memory modules are becoming more and more common nowadays. It's a shame because both Intel and AMD processors benefit from four memory ranks, which means putting at least two 16GB dual-rank memory modules together. The performance hit from single-rank DIMMs isn't overly significant in some cases, but it's clearly visible in the performance charts.

Due to its single-rank design, the Redline Lumina DDR4-3600 C16 simply couldn't compete with its dual-rank rivals even if they had inferior memory timings, such as the Klevv Bolt XR DDR4-3600 C18. Mushkin's memory kit is available through Amazon with a $199.99 price tag, so it's on the pricier side. The Redline Lumina DDR4-3600 C16 might be worth your consideration if you fall for its aesthetics or find it on sale. Otherwise, it's hard to justify the purchase.

Although MSI is known more for its motherboards and graphics cards, the company now also offers up one of the fastest NVMe SSDs available. MSI’s Spatium M480 is a high-end PCIe 4.0 x4 drive that dishes out speeds of up to 7 GBps, while not only looking cool but keeping its cool, too. It’s a pricey SSD, but well worth your consideration if you are on the hunt for a high-end gaming SSD to complement your build’s unique aesthetics.

MSI’s Spatium M480 is the company’s fastest SSD, yet and it's based on Phison’s fastest NVMe controller to date, the PS5018-E18. Like many other high-end gaming drives, the M480 comes in two variants: a model with a heatsink and one without. Today, we take a look at the one with the heatsink, in all of its beautiful splendor.

Our initial impressions are that the MSI Spatium M480 is an attractive drive, for sure. The large bronze-colored heatsink and emblem on top of the device look fantastic, and the heatsink works more than well enough to prevent the Spatium M480 from ever thermal throttling under load. Best of all, it’s only $10 more than the drive without the heatsink. However, it will take more than just good looks for the Spatium M480 to stand out from a growing number of E18-based competitors.

Specifications

The Spatium M480 is available in capacities of 1TB and 2TB in the US market, with the company pricing them at roughly $0.22-$0.23 per GB, depending on the capacity and if you get the one with the heatsink or not. The company also offers a 500GB model, but it will only be available outside of America.

The 2TB is the fastest capacity, and as such, is the model we are analyzing today. It is rated to deliver sequential performance figures of up to 7/6.8 GBps and upwards of 650,000/700,000 random read/write IOPS. The smaller capacities perform a bit slower, as per usual. The 1TB model can deliver similar read performance, but takes a hit on writes, rated for 7/5.5 GBps read/write and the 500GB model, without as many NAND flash dies for interleaving, manages to only muster up to 6.5/2.85 GBps read/write, which is still very respectable.

In terms of endurance and warranty, MSI backs the Spatium M480 fairly well, due to its inclusion of Phison’s fourth-generation LDPC ECC, RAID parity, and end-to-end data path protection. MSI backs the Spatium M480 with a five-year warranty and/or the ability to sustain up to 1,400 TB of writes on our 2TB sample. As for the smaller capacities, their endurance halves with capacity.  

Like most SSDs that we’ve reviewed, the Spatium M480 supports secure erase /Format NVM command to completely wipe to a fresh, empty state. It also has support for TRIM, and S.M.A.R.T. data reporting. But unlike most, it also supports AES 256-bit hardware encryption, making the Spatium M480 perfect, not only fast performance but secure data storage too.

Software & Accessories

MSI doesn’t currently provide SSD software to support the Spatium M480, but the company is working on an upcoming update to MSI Center that will enable users to monitor drive health and performance. The company also states that it will also offer backup & restore functionality via an Actiphy software solution.

As mentioned, we are analyzing the heatsink variant. It comes with a heatsink in the packaging as a separately added piece, rather than pre-applied like on most SSDs that include heatsinks. It's a classy bronze-colored aluminum heatsink that for most use cases isn’t even needed, but is still an added benefit in terms of aesthetic appeal. So, if you end up needing the slim form factor without the heatsink installed, you can still use your motherboard’s included heatsink or throw it in your laptop as well.

A Closer Look

Our Spatium M480 sample features a black PCB and comes in a 2280 double-sided form factor, meaning there are components on both sides of the PCB. This may limit installation ability in some mobile systems. For desktops however, you shouldn’t run into any issues with or without the heatsink installed in the primary M.2 slot. But you may not be able to install an add-in-card if you use a middle or secondary M.2 slot, depending on the motherboard. The heatsink’s height measures 20.40mm vs just 2.15mm of the plain M.2 PCB.

As mentioned earlier, the Spatium M480 is based on Phison’s PS5018-E18, and it comes paired with fast TLC flash to achieve its high-performance specs. The controller is an 8-channel design that features five total cores for data processing. It was also built on a 12nm process to keep down power consumption, although the drive is still fairly power-hungry.

The Phison E18 supports ASPM and ASPT to keep operating temperatures under control, and it even supports L1.2 for low power consumption when idle in mobile devices. It also places the LBA mapping table onto some DDR4 DRAM; our 2TB sample leverages two 8Gb SK hynix DRAM chips, one on each side of the PCB for the task.

As for the fast flash powering the Spatium M480, 32 dies of Micron’s 512Gb 96L TLC spread across eight NAND packages make up the memory array. Each package interfaces with the controller at speeds of 1,200 MTps, which is a bit lower than the controller’s full potential, but still fast enough to keep up with most competitors and other Phison E18-based competition. 

Comparison Products

We compare the MSI Spatium M480 here against a few E18-based competitors including the Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000s, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, Mushkin Gamma, and Seagate's FireCuda 530. We also threw in the WD_Black SN850, Samsung 980 Pro, and Patriot Viper VP4300 for added perspective.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

The Spatium M480 delivered a solid load time of 12.22 seconds, but it wasn’t enough to take the win from Seagate’s FireCuda 530, which leverages Micron’s fastest TLC flash yet. MSI's drive also lagged behind the WD_Black SN850. The M480 managed to outperform both Samsung’s 980 Pro and the Patriot Viper VP4300, however. 

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom dataset. We copy a 50GB dataset including 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

In terms of its file transfer performance, the MSI Spatium M480 delivered fast results that aligned with most of the E18-based competitors. It also scored above that of the WD_Black SN850 and Samsung 980 Pro in the reading portion, but once again the Seagate FireCuda 530 reigned supreme. 

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Test

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The quick benchmark is more relatable to those who use their PCs for leisure or basic office work, while the full benchmark relates more to power users.

PCMark 10’s results showed that while the MSI Spatium M480 is fast, it isn’t quite as fast as the WD_Black SN850 or Seagate FireCuda 530. The WD_Black SN850 absolutely dominates these application workloads with the Seagate FireCuda 530 hot on its heels. While the M480 was very fast in our previous rounds, it lacked the random performance to serve each application’s request at the highest level.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The MSI Spatium M480’s sequential performance ramped up nicely when testing it against various block sizes based on its performance in ATTO. However, Crystal Disk Mark’s sequential QD1 performance showed room for improvement. Random read performance could use improvement too. While the M480 scored a fast random response time of just 0.052, both the Seagate FireCuda 530 and Samsung 980 Pro show the MSI up by responding roughly 20% faster.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

MSI’s Spatium M480 wrote 225GB at an average rate of roughly 6.9 GBps before its performance degraded. Once degraded, it wrote at 1.8 GBps for an additional 1.45TB, before it degraded once more to an average write speed of 1.1GBps for the remainder of the test. In terms of recovery, the Spatium could use some refinement, as it does not recover any of its caches even after 30 minutes of idle.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

MSI’s Spatium M480 proved rather inefficient compared to what we were expecting. Instead of consuming similar power to that of its E18 brethren, the M480 consumed roughly 0.75W more power than average, and scored the highest peak power consumption score in the bunch, bordering 9W. This set it up for a last-place ranking on our efficiency chart.

While the Spatium M480 was less efficient, it still managed to deliver throttle-free performance without the heatsink. At idle, S.M.A.R.T. data reported a reading of 36 degrees Celsius while our thermal gun measured the controller at 51 degrees Celsius. After transferring roughly 600GB to and from the M480, its maximum S.M.A.R.T. data reported temperature reached only 64 degrees Celsius. However, in measuring the controller with a thermal gun at that point, we found the it was operating at temperatures of roughly 85 degrees Celsius.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

MSI’s Spatium M480 delivered solid performance that is up there with some of the fastest NVMe SSDs available. It’s not quite as fast as the new Seagate FireCuda 530, with all of its glorious Micron 176L B47R TLC. But even with just 96L B27B TLC, it put up a good fight in most tests--that is until it came to testing out its efficiency and sustained write speed.

Strangely, while MSI’s Spatium M480 performed similarly enough to its competitors, its efficiency results pointed to it being very power-hungry in comparison to other E18 and B27B combos like the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus or Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000s. And, compared to the Seagate FireCuda 530, the M480’s sustained write performance, while solid for what it is, comes nowhere near close to the speeds the Seagate drive can sustain.  

While slower than the Seagate FireCuda 530, MSI's drive is also much cheaper, although not as cheap as some of its competition. The MSI Spatium commands a premium with its classy but large bronze-colored heatsink and AES 256-bit encryption support. With its heatsink, the Spatium M480 is nearly guaranteed to remain cool under any workload. That said, from our testing, it also proved to operate throttle-free even without it. So, if you don’t care much for the aesthetic appeal, the non-heatsink model should prove just fine and you can save a few bucks.

The Spatium M480 isn’t quite as affordable as the WD_Black SN850 nor Samsung's 980 Pro, which is a bit off-putting, especially considering the cost difference between these SSDs is so large. Both the Samsung and WD Black list at $370 for the 2TB models, while the MSI lists at $435 without the heatsink or $445 with the heatsink. We don’t believe the MSI Spatium M480 is worth the $65-$75 premium over the Samsung or WD drives. Additionally, while it doesn’t come with a heatsink, Mushkin’s Gamma offers a better value, currently listed at $350. But if you catch the Spatium M480 on sale at a comparable price, or just absolutely love its looks, then it's well worth picking up. Its combination of speed and attractive looks are tough to beat.

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Mushkin has launched a few new Greek-inspired SSDs as of late, including the Alpha, Delta, and Gamma. Today, we are looking at the best of these, which somewhat counterintuitively is the Mushkin Gamma. Powered by Phison’s E18 NVMe SSD controller, Mushkin’s Gamma can deliver speeds of over 7GBps and is priced a bit less than that of similar SSDs, making it a fairly good value for those on the hunt for fast storage. 

We’ve known Mushkin to be a fan of Silicon Motion controllers over the years, releasing affordable SATA SSDs to bleeding-edge NVMe drives, capable of multi-gigabyte speeds. However, since our last review of a Mushkin SSD, the company has jumped ship from Silicon Motion and is now working with Phison to develop its latest SSDs. Why switch to another SSD controller manufacturer when Silicon Motion’s controllers treated Mushkin so well? The answer is simple: performance capability and availability. 

Unlike Silicon Motion, Phison is in a much better position in the eyes of most SSD vendors these days, offering not only PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD controllers, but also a high availability of much faster PCIe 4.0 x4 ones. On the other hand, Silicon Motion is facing tougher times due to issues getting its next-gen SM2264 PCIe 4.0 SSD controller into production. While the design work is done, the controller is still not available for companies to integrate into their next-gen SSDs.  

Thus, when Mushkin went on the look for a vendor to power its next-generation PCIe 4.0 SSD, Phison was the obvious choice. After seeing Phison’s PS5018-E18 offer up blisteringly fast performance, Mushkin was sold, and seemingly just like that, the Gamma was born. Mushkin’s Gamma isn’t a very fancy SSD, nor does it come with a heatsink or value-add software, but what it does have is solid PCIe Gen4 performance at a low cost within its market segment.

Specifications

Currently, the Mushkin Gamma comes in just two capacities: 1TB and 2TB, but a 4TB model is planned. Priced a few dollars below most of its competition at $188.99 for the 1TB capacity and $378.99 for the 2TB capacity, the Gamma is a value in its market segment, but it still carries a premium price tag compared to slower PCIe Gen3 devices. Muskin rates the Gamma to deliver sequential performance figures of up to 7,200/6,890 MBps read/write and deliver up to 660,000 / 1,250,000 random read/write IOPS.  

Due in part to Phison’s fourth-generation LDPC ECC, Mushkin backs the Gamma with respectable endurance ratings of up to 700 TBW at 1TB, 1,400 TBW at 2TB, and 3,000 TBW at 4TB, all within a five-year warranty. The Gamma supports AES 256-bit hardware encryption, enabling this SSD to deliver not only responsive performance but also data security in case of theft when activated.

A Closer Look

Mushkin’s Gamma is one of the few Phison PS5018-E18-powered SSDs to come without a heatsink preinstalled, but based on most of our testing, it’s not needed. And, even without one, the Gamma looks fairly cool with its red-and-black design and black PCB. Our 2TB Mushkin Gamma comes in an M.2 2280 double-sided form factor, packed with components.

Phison’s PS5018-E18 is a popular controller that we have covered extensively in recent months. With an 8-channel, penta-core architecture built on a 12nm process, it is a flash-managing powerhouse. It eats up workloads and spits them out, especially when paired with the fastest flash in the industry.

Unfortunately, the Mushkin Gamma doesn’t come with the fastest flash we’ve tested yet. Instead, it comes with Micron’s B27B 96L TLC. Still, this flash is fast enough to keep up with some of the best depending on the workload, with eight NAND flash packages onboard. Each of the Mushkin Gamma’s NAND flash packages contains four 512Gb dies, interfacing with the controller at speeds of 1,200 MTps. Also, there are two DRAM ICs on our 2TB sample, both manufactured by SK hynix, operating at 1,600MHz, and measuring 8Gb in density. 

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Comparison Products

We put the Mushkin Gamma up against several of the best SSDs available today. These include the Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850, as well as a few other Phison E18 powered SSDs such as the Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000s, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, and Inland Performance Plus. We also added the Patriot Viper VP4300 and Samsung 970 EVO Plus for additional perspective.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

When it came to loading up each level of Final Fantasy XIV’s Shadorbringers benchmark, the Mushkin Gamma managed to outperform both Samsung’s 980 Pro and Patriot’s Viper VP4300 with a solid time. Even so, with the second-fastest total time in the bunch, it wasn’t quite able to show up the WD_Black SN850.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom dataset. We copy a 50GB dataset including 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

While the WD_Black SN850 was the top dog in our game load test, it fell behind the E18 competitors here, now trailing the Mushin Gamma. Mushkin’s Gamma scores second place again, however this time it showed similar performance to that of the Samsung 980 Pro when tasked with copying many files. But when tasked to read back our large .zip, it pulled ahead of the Samsung 980 Pro, outperforming it by roughly 200 MBps.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Test

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The quick benchmark is more relatable to those who use their PCs for leisure or basic office work, while the full benchmark relates more to power users.

Mushkin’s Gamma scored a respectable result overall here, and outperforms the InnoGrit-powered Patriot Viper VP4300, but like the other Phison E18 powered competitors, could not match the responsiveness provided by both the WD_Black SN850 and Samsung 980 Pro in these workloads.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

Sequential performance is the Mushkin Gamma’s strong suit, especially when it comes to writing. At a queue depth (QD) of one, performance scales well across most block sizes, and it even manages to outperform Smausng’s 980 Pro and WD Black SN850 when writing, but these two top competitors deliver a bit better read performance than the Gamma. 

Furthermore, Mushkin’s Gamma delivered respectable random response times, but still wasn’t quite able to match the responsiveness of the best with Micron’s B27B TLC holding it back. At ultra-high queue depths and using 16 threads to achieve them, the Gamma delivered roughly 1.6 million random write IOPS, though.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

Mushkin’s Gamma features a good-sized SLC write cache and sustained performance once the cache is full. The Gamma wrote roughly 225GB of data before degrading in performance, falling from 6.9 GBps down to an average rate of 1.8 GBps for an additional 1.4TB. Beyond that point, write speed fell once more, averaging 1,140 MBps for the remainder of the test. After multiple idle rounds, measuring up to 30 minutes, the Gamma did not recover its SLC cache, but recovered from its slowest write speeds, averaging 1.8 GBps throughout each test round.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

Mushkin’s Gamma can be quite power-hungry in use, consuming almost 9W when tasked with our large file folder copy test. As such, it just shy of last place on our efficiency ranking chart, with the highest average power consumption in the bunch. That said, its idle power consumption was better managed than Patriot’s Viper VP4300 and WD_Black SN850 on our test bench.

At idle in our 23C lab and no airflow directed to the SSD, temperatures range in the mid-30s (degrees Celsius) as reported by the S.M.A.R.T. data. And under load, it reported a max temperature of 73 degrees Celcius after writing 600GB of data to the SSD. When measuring the components with an IR thermometer, the controller showed a peak temp of 85 degrees Celsius, but did not throttle as we saw with some earlier E18 NVMe SSDs.

Test Setup and Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

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With great all-around performance, the Mushkin Gamma is a capable beast that earns its place atop the company’s SSD portfolio, and a solid pick for those looking for a fast PCIe Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSD at a good price. 

Although it isn’t the most efficient SSD for mobile applications and is not quite as responsive as our top picks in all workloads, it delivers exceptional performance in most situations. Also, the Gamma comes with AES 256-bit encryption support and unlike previously reviewed E18 powered SSDs, keeps cool under load without a heatsink thanks to Phison’s latest firmware. 

At $390, our 2TB sample is pricey compared to most Gen3 SSDs and much more costly than the previous generation E16 powered SSDs, but still undercuts the WD_Black SN850 by roughly $20 and the Samsung 980 Pro by $30 at the time of publishing. If you are strictly looking at price per GB, the Mushkin Gamma is the better value. However, it lacks the supporting software these alternatives provide. 

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Mushkin has been away from the memory game for a while, but the company is back with a new series of Redline Lumina RGB DDR4 memory kits designed and optimized for the most up-to-date Intel and AMD platforms.

The Redline Lumina RGB memory arrives with an aluminum heat spreader that's complemented with snazzy RGB lighting. The light bar features 16 high-quality RGB LEDs to provide vivid and smooth illumination. Like many modern memory kits, Redline Lumina RGB is ready to integrate itself into the majority of motherboard RGB ecosystems, including Asus Aura Sync, MSI Mystic Light Sync, and ASRock Polychrome.

Mushkin offers the Redline Lumina RGB in dual-channel packages in three different densities. You can choose from 16GB (2X8GB), 32GB (2X16GB) or 64GB (2X32GB) configurations.

Mushkin has all its bases covered on the performance front. The Redline Lumina RGB starts at DDR4-2666 data rate and extends up to DDR4-4133. The timings are not bad either, with CAS Latency (CL) values spanning from CL16 to CL19. The Redline Lumina RGB stays within specification at all times, regardless of the memory frequency. The DRAM voltage varies from 1.2V to 1.35V.

Equipped with Intel XMP 2.0 support, Redline Lumina RGB memory kits take the hassle out of setup. With the click of a button (or at least the enabling of a preset), you can get the memory kits up to their advertised memory frequency in a jiffy. The company says all Redline Lumina RGB memory kits are thoroughly hand-tested in North America. Confident of their quality, Mushkin backs every Redline Lumina RGB memory kit with a limited lifetime warranty.

You can already find the Redline Lumina at Newegg. The 16GB and 32GB memory kits start at $96.99 and $179.99, respectively, while the 64GB memory kits sell for $324.99.

Adding some super-fast NVMe storage to your motherboard is great for breathing new speedy life into your build, but adding anything more than 1TB can be quite expensive. That’s why we’re big fans of this deal that gives you 2TB of some of the best SSD storage that for a seriously affordable price.

For a limited time over at Newegg, you can snag the 2TB Mushkin Pilot-E M.2 NVMe SSD for just $197.99, which is a big $112 discount. 

• More: Best SSDs: From Budget SATA to Blazing-Fast NVMe
• Best External Drives: Portable Hard Drives and SSDs of 2021
• Mushkin Pilot-E M.2 NVMe SSD Review: Taking Flight

More eagle-eyed deal spotters out there will see that the Pilot-E drops in price regularly, but it's never dropped to a price this low. That makes for some serious value for money, given the premium speeds and features this offers.

Performance across our tests remained impressively competitive against higher priced drives, even out-performing the $100 costlier WD Black SN750 in PCMark 8 Storage 2.0 Testing. 

The rest of our testing is laid out in detail in our Mushkin Pilot-E M.2 NVMe SSD review, but to give you the cliff notes, this is an ideal choice for adding plenty of high speed storage to your PC, complete with impressive endurance and efficiency, 256-bit AES encryption, and a large SLC write cache. 

Provided you can look past the 3-year warranty and the fact it's not the fastest internal SSD out there, then at this price, the Mushkin Pilot-E provides some of the best bang for your buck we’ve seen in an NVMe deal. For more storage options on the cheap, check out our best deals on SSDs and hard drives hub.

With many of the most recent crop of games exceeding 100GB in size, adding more storage to complement your OS drive is quickly becoming a necessity. And in the world of SATA SSD storage, nothing really comes as close to providing as much value for money as this deal we've found.

Over on Newegg for today only, you can grab a Mushkin Enhanced RAW series 1TB SSD for just $81.99 — that is 25% off the list price and brings the cost down to only $0.082 per GB.

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Sporting a standard 2.5-inch form factor, this drive will fit with ease into your setup and utilizes 3D TLC, rather than less-durable QLC found in many modern budget drives.

Beyond this, you find some other more premium technologies built-in, such as LDPC ECC, Static Data Refresh and internal flash RAID.

And that lower price doesn't mean a compromise in speed. Tested using CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 x64, this drive is capable of hitting sequential speeds up to 560 MBps read and 520 MBps write.

It may not be the greatest SSD in the market today, but at this kind of price, it provides a great bang for your storage buck. Want to explore the market? Check out our best deals on SSDs and hard drives hub.

NVMe storage prices seem to be creeping up again, particularly on the best SSDs like the Samsung 980 Pro. That makes any deals that go against this trend all the more valuable, whether it’s to upgrade your OS drive or add another dose of fast storage to your motherboard.

This is especially true when it comes to more premium drives using high-end components, like the Mushkin Pilot-E M.2 2TB model. You can get this SSD right now from Newegg for just $208.99, which is a massive $101 saving, bringing the cost down to just $0.10 per GB.

• More: Best SSDs: From Budget SATA to Blazing-Fast NVMe
• Best External Drives: Portable Hard Drives and SSDs of 2021
• Mushkin Pilot-E M.2 NVMe SSD Review: Taking Flight

Boasting fast performance, high endurance and 256-bit AES encryption, the Mushkin Pilot-E earned 4 stars in our review, with its large SLC write cache and strong power efficiency standing out as key points in its favor.

And now, with over a hundred bucks off the list price, it provides high end features with real value for money. It's rated to hit up to 3.5GBps read and 3.1GBps write, with an impressive endurance of 1300 TBW.

In our testing, the Mushkin Pilot-E M.2 fared well in the middle of the pack across a variety of real world usage scenarios, from the Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers benchmark to PCMark 8 trace-based benchmarking.

And given that many of this drive's competitors charge the same amount for just 1TB of storage, this SSD deal certainly provides some of the best bang for your buck at this price point.

There are tons of deals on tech right now as the holiday season approaches, and we're working around the clock to find you the best offers.

Today, we're highlighting a Newegg deal on this Mushkin 500GB internal SSD. You can find plenty of deals on SSDs in our master SSD sales page. Be sure to check back every day for updates, and if deals aren't your concern, visit our best SSDs page to see our top picks.

This model has read/write speeds as high as 560/510 MBps. It's designed to provide end-to-end data protection while featuring internal flash RAID and StaticDataRefresh.

This is a 2.5" drive, so you will need a SATA III interface to connect. This drive also supports both TRIM and S.M.A.R.T. commands.

Visit the Mushkin RAW 500GB product page on the Newegg website to get this deal. It's set to expire in less than 24 hours. If you need more storage, the 1TB version of this drive is also on sale for $90 (down from $110).

If you are on the hunt for a new M.2 NVMe boot drive and aren’t looking to break the bank, Lexar’s NM610 could fit the bill nicely. It doesn’t feature DRAM, but with performance of over 2.1 GBps and budget-friendly pricing, it’s quite a decent buy at this time.

With its tiny M.2 form factor and a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, Lexar’s latest SSD to hit the market takes on all these qualities. It falls just short of our list of best SSDs, but Lexar's NM610 is a solid choice that's more than three times faster than a run-of the mill SATA SSD and can easily keep up with reading and editing 4K video files and other key data. An upgrade that replaces Lexar's NM600, the NM610 expands the capacity range to 1TB while shrinking the amount of over-provisioning space to provide more usable capacity. 

Lexar NM610 Specifications

Lexar’s NM610 is available in capacities of 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB and is covered by a three-year warranty. Pricing is currently quite competitive with the 1TB model we are reviewing listed for $116 at the time of writing. That's just a few dollars more than popular SATA SSDs and undercuts many of its entry-level competitors.

Lexar over-provisioned the NM610 a bit less than the NM600 it replaces, having 9% set aside for the purpose rather than 13%. This gives the end-user a bit more usable space while providing enough performance over the device's lifetime. Lexar rates the NM610 to hit sequential performance figures of up to 2.1/1.6 GBps read/write and random performance of up to 188,000 / 156,000 IOPS read/write.

The SSD features SMI’s proprietary NANDXtend ECC which is marketing talk for their LDPC ECC hard and soft decoding along with a RAID-like protection scheme that ensures data integrity and reliability over time. This enables the Lexar NM610 to endure up to 125TB of writes per 250GB of storage space over the course of its warranty period.

A Closer Look at the Lexar NM610

Lexar’s NM610 doesn’t feature killer looks, nor a heatsink, but it comes in an M.2 2280 singled sided form factor, meaning all the components are on just one side of the PCB for greater device compatibility. The PCB is also black, which is quite nice looking in contrast to the ugly blue PCB of the Patriot P300 we recently reviewed.

Silicon Motion’s SM2263XT PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 SSD controller lies at the heart of the Lexar NM610. It is a low power SSD controller with a dual-core ARM Cortex processor powering it. There are four NAND channels and it features a DRAMless architecture. These characteristics mean that it isn’t quite as fast as the company’s top-of-the-line 8-channel DRAM-based SM2262EN, but it has proven itself quite capable in the past for average consumer use.  

Rather than use an onboard DRAM cache for accelerating FTL access, which usually helps significantly with responsiveness, the SMI SM2263XT leverages an NVMe feature called Host Memory Buffer (HMB) to use a few MB of the host’s DRAM for the task instead. 

Lexar has opted to pair the host controller with Intel’s 64L TLC NAND flash, which interfaces which operates at a rate of about 533-667MT/s. Our 1TB sample features four NAND packages with four 512Gb dies in each, sixteen dies total.

One thing that was a bit surprising, was that, when looking deeper into the Lexar’s power specifications, we found that based on the S.M.A.R.T. data, the NM610 doesn’t support multiple power states like most other NVMe SSDs do. So, it will be in an active state at all times sipping about half a watt at least, even when at idle. 

Comparison Products

We compared Lexar’s NM610 to many popular competitors. At the high-end, we looked at Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus and WD’s Black SN750. As its main competition, we threw in the Mushkin Helix-L, Intel SSD 665P, WD Blue SN550, Patriot P300, and an Adata XPG SX600 Pro. Additionally, we added in the Crucial MX500 and WD Black HDD for good measure.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood and Stormbringer are two free real-world game benchmarks that easily and accurately compare game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

When it comes to loading up your game’s data, an SSD is a huge upgrade over any HDD. Lexar’s NM610 loaded up the multiple game scenes in Final Fantasy’s benchmark within half the time it took the HDD. DRAM-based competitors like the WD Blue SN550 and Intel SSD 665P both outrank the NM610, but overall, the NM610 scores quite closely to the high-end WD Black SN750.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom blocks of data. Our 50GB data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. Our 100GB includes 22,579 files with 50GB of them being large movies. We copy the data sets to new folders and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly written 6.5GB zip file, 8GB test file, and a 15GB movie file.

Lexar’s NM610 isn’t an ideal candidate to use in your professional workflow, but it will keep up with some moderate file transfers. The NM610 scores fifth place in the copy tests. It didn’t do as well in the read tests, however. The Adata XPG SX6000 Pro and Patriot P300 moved up in rank and the NM610 fell into seventh place when reading back the large test files.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Tests

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The quick benchmark is more relatable to those who use their PCs lightly, while the full benchmark relates more to power users. If you are using the device as a secondary drive, the data test will be of the most relevance. 

Even without the use of local DRAM, Lexar’s NM610 is responsive. It scores fourth place in the Data and Quick System Drive benchmarks. The Full benchmark is the most taxing and because of that, the NM610 fell into fifth place with the WD Black SN750 overtaking it due to its incredibly consistent write performance.

Trace Testing – SPECworkstation 3

Like PCMark 10, SPECworkstation 3 is a trace-based benchmark, but it is designed to push the system harder by measuring workstation performance in professional applications.

Compared to an HDD, these SSDs are in a whole other league when it comes to speeding up your workflow. The higher performance SSDs rank the best of course, but the Lexar doesn’t do too badly. It outperforms the SATA SSD and scores significantly higher throughput when being hammered with mixed workloads.

Synthetics - ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

In ATTO, we tested Lexar’s NM610 at a QD of 1, representing most day-to-day file access at various block sizes. Overall, it displays fairly good results. Speeds ramp up nicely as the file size increases along the same lines as the rest of the pack until it peaks at 1.8/1.6 GBps read/write.

Synthetic Testing - iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly-configurable storage benchmarking tool that vendors often use to measure the performance of their devices.

Lexar delivers peak sequential performance of at 2.1/1.7 GBps read/write by a QD of 4.  Random performance looks to be pretty good too. At QD1, it ranks third fastest in responding to read requests and can dish out nearly 12K IOPS in our test bench, nearly matching the Samsung 970 EVO Plus. And, it managed to surpass its official peak random IOPS ratings by quite a bit. 

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery, and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.  

When possible, we also log the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

When we wrote to Lexar’s NM610, it sustained a speed of about 1.7 GBps until the write cache filled. Once it did, it had written over 136GB of data. Beyond that, with very inconsistent results fluctuating from about 1 GBps down to 125 MBps, write speed averaged about 275 MBps. Additionally, when testing the unit without any airflow in our 25C lab, it did not exhibit any thermal throttling. S.M.A.R.T. data reported a peak of 64C after moving around 300GB of data. 

Power Consumption on Lexar NM610

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.

Lexar’s NM610 is very power-efficient when copying files around, so much so that it earns a first-place finish here. It averaged similar power to that of the Crucial MX500 and its maximum consumption is much better restricted. 

At idle, it consumes about half a watt, with APSM enabled or disabled while competitors like the Helix-L and Intel SSD 665p can both freely fall into lower power states when the feature is enabled.  Checking on the S.M.A.R.T. data, it becomes clear as to why. The Lexar NM610 doesn’t support lower power states at all as it comes with support for only one active state. 

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With the newest addition to the NM series hitting the market, Lexar’s NM610 isn’t too much different from the NM600 it replaces. The product line gains a 1TB capacity and performs well with less factory overprovisioning than the models before it. It never was one to be a record-breaker, but rather it is a budget-oriented SATA killer. And, when it comes to doing that, it does a great job.

Lexar’s NM610 offers up over 2.1/1.7 GBps read/write performance thanks to its PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, dominating SATA SSDs for only a few dollars more in most cases. It is even cheaper than Samsung’s 860 EVO at publishing time. In testing, Silicon Motion's SM2263XT controller has proven itself to be a responsive NVMe SSD platform, even though it lacks DRAM cache.  The Lexar NM610 can’t keep deliver sustained write performance that's nearly as good as that from the more-expensive Samsung 970 EVO Plus and WD Black SN750. But that isn’t much of an issue for the majority of the day to day tasks we perform. 

The Lexar NM610 is optimized for the most common tasks. Loading up your favorite game or application is nearly-instantaneous in many cases. But this is also true of other entry-level SSDs. 

Amongst DRAMless SSDs, the WD’s Blue SN550 offers the best performance and warranty coverage. Intel’s SSD 665p, on the other hand, utilizes the DRAM-based Silicon Motion SM2263EN NVMe controller with QLC NAND flash and can keep up with or even surpass the NM610. While the Intel 665p’s performance is highly optimized for consumer use, its write performance degrades to very low speeds after the write cache fills. 

At press time, the Lexar 1TB was out stock but listed for a best price of $115 while the WD Blue SN550 was just $10 more and the Intel SSD 665p was $24 more. Those looking for the best performance in a budget NVMe SSD would  fare better with the SN550, but if you're looking for value -- particularly if it's on a sale -- the Lexar NM610 is a strong choice.

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Team Group’s MP33 is a budget-friendly PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD. Dishing out sequential speeds of up to 1.8/1.5 GBps read/write, it offers significantly higher performance than any SATA SSD available. Plus, it comes with a five-year warranty and respectable endurance ratings. If you are in the market for something in the NVMe flavor, Team Group’s MP33 1TB is a great bargain option to consider.

SSDs launch into the market rated at certain speeds and stay on the market for a few years before they begin to get phased out due to various reasons. That could be due to dwindling sales, supply changes, or just because the company has a new product release scheduled for every 18 months on the calendar. Because of this fast-paced product cycle, most SSDs retain the same hardware from when they were launched up until they are phased out. At least, that is how it is with the more expensive, brand name ones.

When we dive into the budget arena, we sometimes see companies do strange things. Price is key and lower cost drives sell faster than higher-cost ones. In order to maintain competitive pricing, SSD vendors must find ways to lower the build cost on these lower budget-oriented SSDs. The most common route we see companies take is to go with a DRAMless SSD controller and find cheaper NAND, or sometimes they'll just use whatever is available at the time.

When designing a budget SSD, it isn’t uncommon to find different hardware for the same model a year, or even months, after launch. As long as the initial specifications are matched or exceeded, the parts change isn’t that big of a deal. It is only when manufacturers start swapping out to inferior hardware that we start to take notice.

When the MP33 first launched, it came out with a Phison E13T DRAMless NVMe SSD controller and a three-year warranty. Interestingly, the hardware powering our new review sample differs from the originally launched unit. Instead of a Phison controller, the new versions come with Silicon Motion’s SM2263XT DRAMless NVMe controller as well as a few other bells and whistles. Unlike most changes we’ve seen in the past, Team Group’s MP33 looks to be one for the better.

Specifications

Team Group’s MP33 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 SSD comes in capacities that span from 128GB all the way up to 2TB. For a budget-oriented gamer or one just looking to save a few dollars, pricing is fairly low and competitive.

Performance-wise, the MP33 is rated to dish out up to 1.8/1.5 GBps of read/write throughput and 220,000 / 200,000 random read/write IOPS of peak performance. Bear in mind that this SSD features an SLC write cache, so, its write performance can degrade during large write transfers.

Team Group backs the MP33 with a five-year warranty and rates the endurance fairly competitively per capacity point. Rated to write for up to 600TB within its warranty, our 1TB sample has the same up to endurance rating as the Samsung 970 EVO Plus and WD Black SN750, which are both pricey high-end alternatives. The MP33 also supports S.M.A.R.T. data reporting, Trim, and secure erase via the Format NVM command.

Software and Accessories

Team Group has an SSD Toolbox available for download. It allows you to monitor your SSD’s lifespan and usage. It also allows you to clone your data, although migration isn’t supported on NVMe products.  

A Closer Look

Our MP33 sample features a black PCB, but a rather unappealing sticker and the green indicator light take from the aesthetic. It comes in an M.2 2280 single-sided form factor, meaning all components are on just one side for thinness.

The SSD is powered by Silicon Motion’s SM2263XT 4-channel NVMe controller. It has a dual-core ARM Cortex processor at its heart and features a DRAMless architecture. Normally the DRAM cache is used by the controller for caching flash translation layer FTL data. Performance typically suffers without the cache–that is, without Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology.

Silicon Motion designed the SM2263XT to utilize HMB to cache FTL data on the host’s DRAM, thus eliminating the controller’s need for it onboard the SSD. Only a small amount of DRAM space from the host system is needed (typically about 32-128MB). 

Micron’s 3rd-gen 96L 3D TLC interfaces with the controller at speeds of up to 667MT/s. At 1TB, our sample comes with four NAND packages on the PCB. Within these are sixteen 512Gb (64GB) NAND die, which are distributed 1 die per chip enable (CE), and four per channel. The MP33’s NAND endurance comes thanks to Silicon Motion’s NANDXtend ECC, which is the company’s low-density parity-check code. This, along with end-to-end data path protection, ensure your data stays safe.

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Comparison Products

Today we put the Team Group MP33 up against a bunch of value-oriented competitors. We’ve included the Mushkin Helix-L that has an identical design, with the only difference being that the Helix-L uses Micron’s last-gen 64L TLC flash. We also threw in the Kingston A2000, Crucial P1, and Intel 660p, all rocking SMI 2263EN controllers complemented with a DRAM buffer. Additionally, we added in the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro and XPG SX6000 Pro, as well as the WD Blue SN550. Finally, we tossed in a Crucial MX500 and WD Black HDD for good measure.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood and Stormbringer are two free real-world game benchmarks that easily and accurately compare game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

The MP33's game scene loading performance is on par with most SSDs. In total, the MP33 performs similarly to the Helix-L and Intel 660p. It's only a second faster than the SATA Crucial MX500, but offers significant gains over the HDD.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom blocks of data. Our 50GB data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. Our 100GB includes 22,579 files with 50GB of them being large movies. We copy the data sets to new folders and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly written 6.5GB zip file, 8GB test file, and a 15GB movie file.

When copying 50GB of files, the MP33 delivered faster performance than most of the value-oriented competitors, although the Intel 665p is right on its heels. When we copy the 100GB dataset, the MP33 does well again, but the WD Blue SN550 and Intel 665p offer a bit more performance in this larger file copy test.

Team Group’s MP33 is also pretty fast at reading files, although performance fell behind most NVMe SSDs with TLC NAND and it wasn’t even in the same league as the more-powerful Adata XPG SX8200 Pro. It came in fifth place when reading most of the large files and leads over the QLC NAND flash-based alternatives, outperforming them in all read tests.   

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Tests

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The quick benchmark is more relatable to those who use their PCs lightly, while the full benchmark relates more to power users. If you are using the device as a secondary drive, the data test will be of most relevance.  

Overall, Team Group’s MP33 will provide you with a snappy user experience during typical desktop PC use. It ranks well in PCMark 10’s storage tests and scores fifth place in the data test, even outranking the Kingston A2000 which has a DRAM-based architecture. Once it hits the quick and full tests, however, the MP33 falls into sixth place. However, it still outperforms the SX6000 Pro and Crucial MX500.

Trace Testing – SPECworkstation 3

Like PCMark 8, SPECworkstation 3 is a trace-based benchmark, but it is designed to push the system harder by measuring workstation performance in professional applications.

As we saw in PCMark 10, Team Group’s MP33 lags during heavier workloads like most of the other DRAMless SSDs, save for the WD Blue SN550. After bombarding the drive with this much heavier workload than what PCMark 10 hit it with, we see this trend continue. 

Thanks to their DRAM-based architectures, the Kingston A2000, Intel SSD 665p, and Crucial P1 offer a better quality of service than the DRAMless alternatives. 

Synthetics - ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

We tested Team Group’s MP33 at a QD (queue depth) of 1, representing most day to day file access at various block sizes. It delivers slightly faster small file size performance at 8KB and 16KB file sizes than the Helix-L. The Kingston A2000 and WD Blue SN550 both show better performance overall, though.

Synthetic Testing - iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool that vendors often use to measure the performance of their devices.

Peak read performance measured in at 2.1 GBps of throughput, and write performance hit 1.7 GBps, both exceeding the slower, but official, 1.8/1.5 GBps specification. Random performance is very responsive thanks to the SMI controller and Micron NAND being tuned so well together.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery, and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.  

When possible, we also log the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

The MP33’s write cache measured in at just over 150GB. The drive wrote to the cache at roughly 1,690 MBps for a minute and a half. Once filled, write performance fell to inconsistently slow speeds that averaged 185MBps. This is about 100MBps slower (on average) than the Mushkin Helix-L’s base write speed with 64L TLC NAND flash. There were even moments when writes had to wait and no data was written for 1-4 seconds, similar to how the DRAMless Adata SX6000 Pro performs when its cache runs out. After finishing writing to the cache, the MP33 recovers fairly quickly: It freed up about 65GB of cache for more incoming writes after a minute of idle.

Temperatures were well within the normal operating range during the file transfers. The drive didn't overheat even when we transferred over 200GB of data to and from the SSD at full speed in a room with static air at 25C.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.

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Team Group’s MP33 is a nice little M.2 NVMe SSD for those looking to save a few bucks on their storage while still cruising along at faster-than-SATA speeds. While Team Group initially rated the MP33 for a conservative 1.8/1.5 GBps of read/write throughput with the original Phison E13T, but the newer hardware in our sample is a few hundred MBps faster performance. Having clocked it in at over 2.1/1.7 GBps of read/write throughput, we’re quite pleased to see such an improvement.

That’s not all that is impressive though – the drive hits these speeds without the help of a DRAM buffer. When DRAMless SSDs first hit the market, they were very underpowered and lagged with high latency spikes that surpassed even HDDs. Silicon Motion’s SM2263XT handles the task much better than early DRAMless designs, but there is still some room to grow. In testing Team Group’s MP33, we analyzed performance with Micron’s newer 96L NAND flash and together this combination provides a little bit better performance in applications and most file transfers than Micron’s 64L flash does in the Mushkin Helix-L.

There seems to be some work to be done on optimizing the firmware for the new 96L flashl. The flash provided faster burst performance most of the time, but after the write cache filled up, the MP33’s performance was less consistent and led to points where latency halted writes for multiple seconds while the Helix-L didn’t.

Outside of a write-exhausted scenario, meaning the pseudo-SLC cache is full, the MP33 will provide ample performance for average users running office or gaming applications, or even under heavier content-creation tasks. 

The drive isn't as good of a fit for professionals, though. In day-to-day use, it provided slightly more responsiveness than the MX500, a SATA SSD. The MP33 was very snappy while moving around files, too. Even with moderate-sized file copies, it provided much faster performance than the MX500 and HDD. Plus, it is highly power-efficient under load.

Overall the drive delivers fast performance and a black PCB to give it a premium look and feel, too, but the sticker on top of the drive ruins the aesthetic. That simply means it is a perfect candidate to throw under your motherboard’s built-in M.2 heatsink, if you have one. The drives' single-sided PCB also enables it find a home in laptops, or even in some of the thinnest ultralights. The MP33 is a fine boot drive, and with a five-year warranty and 600TB of endurance, it will probably outlast the build you'll put it in.

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Like its bigger brother the KC2000, Kingston's new A2000 uses a Silicon Motion controller and Micron’s 96L TLC flash. However, the SSDs' controller limits performance to about 2.2/2.0 GBps read/write, which results in lower pricing. The drive still performs well, has a long warranty, and also features heavy-duty hardware encryption options that also offset the more conservative performance specifications.

The combination of features makes Kingston’s A2000 a formidable entry-level M.2 NVMe SSD. With a four-channel Silicon Motion SM2263EN PCIe NVMe controller and Micron’s latest 96L TLC powering it, it has got a lot of fight in it. Need to load up your favorite games fast? Easy. Want to host multiple virtual machines? Not a problem. Edit high bit-rate video? It should be a piece of cake with the A2000.

The A2000 is also a great pick if you have sensitive data and want to upgrade your business laptop. The self-encrypting drive supports 256-bit XTS-AES hardware-based encryption at the controller level, so you can password-protect your data with no performance loss. And, with TCG Opal 2.0 support, you can manage the security with Symantec, McAfee, WinMagic, and other business-class security software. As a byproduct of its eDrive support, it also supports BitLocker.

Specifications

Kingston’s A2000 is available in mainstream capacities that stretch from 250GB up to 1TB. MSRPs come in at $39.99, $59.99, and $99.99, respectfully. If you need a larger drive, you should look into the KC2000 as an alternative. 

Kingston rates the A2000 for up to 2.2/2.0 GBps of read/write throughput, and it can dish out 250,000 / 220,000 of random read/write IOPS, too. It comes with high-end endurance ratings that match both the Samsung 970 EVO Plus and WD Black SN750. And, like them, it comes with a 5-year warranty.

Feature-wise, other than the AES 256-bit encryption, the drive has a pseudo-SLC write cache that absorbs inbound writes. It supports TRIM, S.M.A.R.T. data reporting, and you can secure erase it (Format NVM) to ensure your data is completely gone when you sell it, or to restore performance if the drive gets into a degraded state.

Software and Accessories

Except for a serial key for Acronis True Image HD, Kingston doesn’t include any accessories in the package. You can use True Image to easily migrate your existing data from your old drive to your new one. Kingston's SSD Manager toolbox also comes with your purchase. It allows you to manage the security features, adjust overprovisioning, update firmware, secure erase, or just monitor your drive.

A Closer Look

Kingston’s A2000 is an M.2 2280, single-sided form factor SSD. This makes upgrading almost any M.2-based system an easy task without any clearance issues.

Unlike classier M.2 drives, the A2000 lacks a black PCB. Instead, it is a dull blue. Like the KC2000, the white sticker over top of the drive detracts even more from the aesthetics, as it is just plain ugly.

However, the underlying components are anything but. Kingston outfitted the A2000 with Silicon Motion’s SM2263EN, a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 controller, and the company paired it with four packages of Micron’s 96L TLC flash. The SM2263EN supports a DRAM cache for more consistent performance over its DRAMless counterpart (SM2263XT). Kingston slapped on one of its own branded DDR4 NAND ICs for the task.

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Comparison Products

We included the Intel SSD 660p (SM2263EN + Micron 64L QLC), Mushkin Helix-L (SM2253XT + Micron 64L TLC), Adata XPG SX6000 Pro (Realtek RTS5763DL + Micron 64L TLC), and Crucial’s SATA MX500 (SM2258 + Micron 64L TLC) in our test pool. Additionally, we included the Mushkin Pilot-E (SM2262EN + Micron 64L TLC) and Corsair Force MP510 (Phison E12 + Kioxia 64L TLC) as more costly alternatives. We also threw in a 6TB WD Black, a 7200-RPM HDD, for good measure. 

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood benchmark is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

The Kingston A2000 delivers leading-edge game load performance. With a total load time of 18.80 seconds, Kingston’s A2000 took first place, leading even the Mushkin Pilot-E.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom 50GB block of data. Our data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. We copy the files to a new folder and then follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5 GB file.

During our file transfer tests, the A2000 delivered similar performance to other entry-level NVMe SSDs. It averaged 501 MBps when copying the 50GB test folder, outperforming the HDD by five times. It also read back the 6.5GB file at 1.5 GBps, ranking fourth overall in read performance.     

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

Kingston’s A2000 did amazingly well in PCMark 8. With a score of 5,103 points and an average bandwidth of 708 MBps, it scores second place, landing ever-so-slightly behind the Corsair Force MP510. 

Trace Testing – SPECworkstation 3

Like PCMark 8, SPECworkstation 3 is a trace-based benchmark, but it is designed to push the system harder by measuring workstation performance in professional applications. The full suite consists of more than 30 workloads, but we've opted to only run the storage benchmark which uses only 15 of them and categorizes the results into 5 market segments for scoring: Media & Entertainment, Product Development, Life Sciences, Energy, and General Operations.

The Kingston A2000 completed the benchmark in just over 40 minutes and placed third overall. It scored more closely to the Pilot-E and Force MP510 than its entry-level competitors.  The drive certainly stands out if you're looking for consistent performance.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes. We tested at the default queue depth value of 4.

ATTO reaffirms the A2000’s official sequential performance specifications. The drive hit 2,200 MBps read, and actually broke the spec for write performance with a peak of 2,200 MBps.

Synthetic Testing - iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool that vendors often use to measure the performance of their devices.

Kingston’s A2000 peaked at 2,281/2,212 MBps in sequential read/write throughput. Random performance at QD (queue depth) 1-4 was also very responsive. Surprisingly, the DRAMless Mushkin Helix-L is a bit more responsive and was able to deliver slightly faster synthetic read results. The A2000’s random performance peaked at 184,000/267,000 read/write IOPS.

Sustained Sequential Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement a pseudo-SLC cache buffer, which is a fast area of SLC-programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the pSLC cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the pSLC buffer and performance after the buffer is saturated.

As mentioned, the Kingston A2000 features a pSLC write cache. The drive can absorb about 165GB of writes before performance degrades from 2,200 MBps down to roughly 490 MBps.

It is also worth noting the very consistent write pattern after write performance degrades. This is significantly better than the performance the DRAMless Mushkin Helix-L. The A2000 also wrote significantly more data during the test, too.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.

The A2000 ranks in the middle of the pack when it comes to efficiency during the file transfer workload. The A2000's onboard DRAM causes the A2000 to have higher power consumption than the Helix-L, hence the lower efficiency score even though both averaged similar speeds.

When at idle, the A2000 consumed just 12mW when ASPM is enabled, and a little over 600mW when we disabled the feature. So, it is still a good upgrade choice for your next laptop or efficient small form factor PC. 

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The A2000's AES 256-bit hardware encryption helps keep your data secure and safe from prying eyes. Not only is the drive secure, but it is also impressively fast. 

Opting for Silicon Motion’s SM2263EN and pairing it with Micron’s 96L TLC proved to be a wise decision for Kingston. Time and time again, the A2000 delivered speeds that were significantly better than an HDD, and some of its SSD competitors, too. 

Compared to the WD Black HDD, the A2000 scored an average bandwidth that was 47 times greater in PCMark 8, 13 times higher in SPECworkstation 3, and was five to seven times faster during file transfers. If you aren’t been convinced yet, these scores should provide enough reason to upgrade to an A2000 or similar if you haven’t done so already.

Best of all, the A2000 ranked as the fastest SSD in the group when loading Final Fantasy's game scenes, making it a great value for gamers. But if you care about aesthetics, it may stick out like a sore thumb if you don’t place it under a heatsink. That is not to say it needs one, however. During our tests, the A2000's temperatures were well-managed. Even when running multiple 50-100GB transfers simultaneously, temps stayed below 60C with little airflow in our 25C environment.   

Kingston’s A2000 is a well-rounded NVMe SSD overall. Whether you are a business class user, prosumer, or just someone looking to outfit their new build with some speedy storage, the A2000 is a great choice. With competitive pricing, high endurance and five-year warranty to match, the drive ranks among the top value picks.

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Mushkin’s Helix-L is an entry-level SSD through and through. It’s pretty cheap, comes with a 3-year warranty, and it features a DRAMless controller architecture. Even so, it can still deliver a more-than-acceptable level of performance for gamers and mainstream users alike.

Mushkin’s Helix-L is marketed toward budget-conscious gamers with its DNA theme and pricing -- the 1TB model sells for just $107.  It's powered by Silicon Motion’s SM2263XT PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD controller, and our sample features Micron’s 64L TLC NAND flash. This combo lacks DRAM, but resourcefully utilizes Host Memory Buffer, a feature of the NVMe protocol to aid performance instead.

This feature uses a tiny 64MB portion of the host’s DRAM to cache the SSD’s FTL mapping table for better performance than without it. It’s a big improvement over non-HMB designs and can help deliver surprisingly good performance in various tasks.

Specifications

Mushkin’s Helix-L is rated for speeds of up to 2.1 GBps read and 1.7 GBps write at the highest (1TB) capacity. The performance takes a slight hit when looking at the 250GB model though. That model is only rated to 2 GBps read and 1.25 GBps write. Still, that’s much higher than any SATA SSD. Random 4K performance is rated for up to 240,000 / 260,000 read / write IOPS. The 250GB model again is rated just slightly lower, at up to 200,000 IOPS read.

The warranty length is a rather standard at just 3-years, but the drive has endurance figures that match both the Samsung 970 EVO and WD Black SN750. As well, it comes with the standard support for TRIM (via NVM Deallocate), S.M.A.R.T. data reporting, secure erase via the Format NVM command.

Mushkin doesn’t provide the end-user an SSD Toolbox for support. But as nice as that feature is to have, it's not really a necessity. There is plenty of freeware that can cover mainstream cloning and monitoring needs. You do get a Mushkin Enhanced case sticker in the box, however.

A Closer Look

The Mushkin Helix-L is an M.2 2280 form factor SSD that comes either a single- or double-sided, depending on your luck of the draw. Our sample was single-sided and utilizes Micron’s 64L TLC to deliver responsive performance.

Aesthetically, the Helix-L features a black PCB. The DNA sticker on top of the drive is more attractive than most we've seen on M.2 SSDs, but drives with heatsinks usually look better.

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Comparison Products

Today, we're putting the Mushkin Helix-L up against several competing drives, from budget-focused to mainstream performers. These include the higher-end Mushkin Pilot-E (SM2262EN + Micron 64L TLC) and Corsair Force MP510 (Phison E12 + Kioxia 64L TLC). We also added in the mainstream Intel SSD 660p (SM2263EN + Micron 64L QLC), Adata XPG SX6000 Pro (Realtek RTS5763DL + Micron 64L TLC), and Kingston A2000 (SM2263EN + Micron 96L TLC). Finally, we threw in a Crucial’s MX500 (SM2258 + Micron 64L TLC), a SATA SSD, and added in a 6TB WD Black, a 7200 RPM HDD, for extra perspective. 

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood benchmark is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

Silicon Motion based SSDs dominate the game load test, although, it is only by a second or two at most. With a total load time of 19.64 seconds, the Helix-L scores third place overall and delivers a load time that is much faster than the HDD.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom 50GB block of data. Our data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. We copy the files to a new folder and then follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5 GB file.

Mushkin’s Helix-L did surprisingly well during our 50GB folder transfer. With an average throughput of 526 MBps, it even outscored the Kingston A2000, which features a DRAM-based architecture. Still, it couldn’t compete against the Mushkin Pilot-E, which was significantly faster.

During reading a 6.5GB test file back, read performance came in at 1,437 MBps, ranking it fifth overall, and just behind that of the A2000. Both the Mushkin Pilot-E and Corsair Force MP510, with their increased bandwidth, outperform the Helix-L. 

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

Scoring 5,066 points, the Helix-L lands in fifth place here, just behind the Intel SSD 660P and ahead of the Adata XPG SX6000 Pro. It significantly outperforms the HDD under consumer workloads and delivers double the performance of a SATA SSD on this test.

Trace Testing – SPECworkstation 3

Like PCMark 8, SPECworkstation 3 is a trace-based benchmark, but it is designed to push the system harder by measuring workstation performance in professional applications. The full suite consists of more than 30 workloads, but we've opted to only run the storage benchmark which uses only 15 of them and categorizes the results into 5 market segments for scoring: Media & Entertainment, Product Development, Life Sciences, Energy, and General Operations.

Once we put it under a heavier workload, the DRAMless architecture shows its limitations. Like the Adata XPG SX6000 Pro and Intel SSD 660p, the Helix-L didn’t do too well here. The Corsair Force MP510 and Mushkin Pilot-E both wrap up the test in about 30 minutes and the Kingston A2000 took 40 minutes. The Helix-L, however, took a little over an hour to complete the test. Still, that's much better than the 5 hours and 38 minutes the hard drive took.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes. We tested at the default queue depth value of 4.

In ATTO, Mushkin’s Helix-L delivered similar performance to that of the Intel 660P and Adataa SX6000 Pro, hitting 2.1 / 1.7 GBps read/write. The Kingston A2000 scored slightly better, however.

Synthetic Testing - iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool that vendors often use to measure the performance of their devices.

In iometer, like in ATTO, the Mushkin Helix-L hit 2.1/1.7 GBps read/write which is average for an entry-level SSD. Random performance at low QDs was also very respectable with results that ranks it near the top of the charts. It also significantly outperforms any HDD or SATA device.

Sustained Sequential Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement a pseudo-SLC cache buffer, which is a fast area of SLC-programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the pSLC cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the pSLC buffer and performance after the buffer is saturated.

Helix-L’s architecture features an SLC write cache. In testing, we measured our 1TB sample’s SLC cache to be about 137GB in size. After writing to the cache for 81 seconds at just under 1,700MBps, write performance degraded to a very inconsistent average of 280MBps. After 15 minutes of writes,, the Helix-L ranks sixth overall with a total of 367GB written, almost 100GB less than that of the Crucial MX500.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.

While the Mushkin Helix-L isn’t a victor in most tests, it takes the win when it comes to efficiency. Overall, the Helix-L scores first place with an efficiency score of 245 MBps per watt. Maximum and average power consumption was also the lowest in the group at just 3.72W and 2.15W, respectfully. And at idle, the power consumption dropped to 175mW with ASPM enabled, or 520mW when disabled.

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It’s strange to look at all the high-performance NVMe SSDs out there and think that SATA used to be the limit. Even the cheapest NVMe SSDs are significantly faster than what the SATA 6Gbps interface can deliver. As an entry-level NVMe SSD, Mushkin’s Helix-L is a solid option.  

While it features a DRAMless architecture, Silicon Motion’s latest firmware and the new HMB feature seems to provide ample performance in most consumer workloads. Silicon Motion optimized 4K QD1 access on this controller config. When gaming, we saw load times that were up there with the best SSDs. When transferring files around, it even copied at a faster rate than the Kingston A2000, which features DRAM, while being much more power-efficient than that drive.

It's only when the Helix-L is stressed with heavy writes that it lags behind that of a SATA based SSD, though not by too much. When writing constantly to the device, it can absorb upwards of 137GB of data before it falls into a degraded state. Even then, write performance is significantly better than the Intel SSD 660p.

Overall, Mushkin’s Helix-L is a decent buy for those looking to save money while still getting a taste of NVMe speeds. It’s priced to sell and has a 3-year warranty. Although it lacks any software or accessories, with competitive prices and Samsung 970 EVO Plus-like endurance, the Helix-L offers a lot of bang for the buck.

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Some of our memory recommendations from last year are of the market, but the locked versions of Intel’s mainstream platform never went away. B360 and H370-chipset motherboards still limit the firm’s Core i5-and-higher processors to a DDR4-2666 maximum, and using these boards with a Core i3 or lower reduces that limit to a paltry DDR4-2400. This, in an enthusiast market where DDR4-3200 has become mainstream. We can only hope that Intel’s next “locked” mainstream platforms make the leap to higher memory clocks, but until then, those of us who haven’t stepped up to a Z370 or Z390 board still need memory, which brings us to this pair of kits from Mushkin.

Interest in H370- and B360-compatible memory is so low that most of our contacts didn’t even have samples, but Mushkin cared enough about our community that it took the extra time and effort to come up with two kits, its Redline Ridgeback MRA4U266GHHF16GX2 (2x 16GB) and its standard Redline MRA4U266GHHF8GX2 (2x 8GB). Other than the heat spreaders, the only difference between these two is that the 32GB kit populates both sides of each module with 8Gb (eight gigabit) DRAM ICs (chips), while the 16GB kit’s modules have only one populated side. This corresponds to the terms “dual-rank” and “single-rank”, where a “rank” is the collection of ICs that populate one of the module’s two 64-bit interfaces.

Both kits need XMP mode to enable DDR4-2666 data rates at 16-17-17-36 timings, even though neither profile required more than the standard 1.20V. If you figure out after you buy either kit that your CPU doesn’t support this data rate (because it’s not a Core i5 or better), or that your motherboard doesn’t support XMP mode, you’ll be stuck at DDR4-2133 CAS 15. Of course, you can always try configuring your memory manually.

Comparison Hardware

Our recent Ryzen Deep Dive hammered home a point that we’d seen throughout several years of Intel-based reviews: that two ranks per channel have a significant performance advantage over one. Today, we’re comparing Mushkin’s two-by-dual-rank 32GB and two-by-single-rank 16GB kits to G.Skill’s low-cost Ripjaws V and HyperX Gaming’s Predator low-latency kits.

We continue to use our classic benchmark suite with a classic graphics card and lower-priced CPU to better match the B360/H370 target market. Intel’s Core i5-9700K is locked to 4.30 GHz for the ultimate performance consistency, MSI’s classic GTX 1080 Armor OC graphics card sets on its B360M Mortar motherboard, and Toshiba’s OCZ RD400 NVMe SSD reduces load times and any storage bottlenecks.

Lowest Stable Timings at 1.35V (Max) on MSI B360M Mortar BIOS 1.70 (08/08/2019)

Being stuck at DDR4-2666 or lower memory speeds doesn’t mean we can’t at least try for better performance: Bumping the voltage up to 1.35V helped the Mushkin 32GB and 16GB kits remain stable at 13-15-15 and 13-14-14 timings, respectively. Unfortunately, both G.Skill and HyperX Gaming kits undercut the latencies of Mushkin’s 32GB kit.

Benchmark Results

Though it finishes Sandra Memory Bandwidth in third place, the 32GB Mushkin kit is close enough to its rivals to potentially compete for a value award. Mushkin’s 16GB kit fares slightly better against competing 16GB kits.

F1 2015 shows some oddly spectacular results for nitpickers: Both of Mushkin’s kits fell behind rivals at XMP settings, but both also excelled at custom-tuned settings.

Remembering that less task completion time means more performance, we see that Mushkin’s 32GB kit lagged slightly behind its rivals in 7-Zip, and that its 16GB kit beat them in custom tune. Whether or not advantages this small are worth the effort of tuning are up to you, but doing so did shave nearly a minute off a 12-minute encode here.

The surprising part of this evaluation is that the Redline Ridgeback 32GB kit was cheap enough to beat even G.Skill’s value-series Ripjaws V. Just a few dollars difference was enough for the 32GB kit to steal the 32GB value crown.

As for Mushkin’s 16GB kit, it faltered in value to the Ripjaws V. You win some, you lose some. But pricing often shifts, and if the winds of commerce blow in Muskin’s favor, either kit should serve builders or upgraders on Intel’s lesser chipset platforms well.

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Adata’s XPG-branded Gammix S11 Pro NVMe M.2 SSD offers a great mix of aesthetics and performance. At a price of $149.99, the 1TB model we're looking at today comes at a competitive price, considering its ability to deliver speeds of up to 3.5/3.0GB/s read/write. It also ships with a rather flashy red heatsink that keeps this high-performance storage device cool, even when the pressure is on.

Early in 2019, we reviewed Adata’s XPG SX8200 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD, and it has been one of our favorite SSDs to recommend for those on a budget due to its price to performance ratio. The Gammix S11 Pro copies the SX8200 Pro’s recipe for success, just like the vanilla Gammix S11 copied the SX8200’s component design before.

The S11 Pro utilizes Silicon Motion’s current top-end consumer controller, the SM2262EN, and is paired with Micron’s 64L TLC flash, a favorable combination for those looking for speedy performance. The most apparent difference between the two is that the Gammix S11 Pro features a red-and-black heatsink while the SX8200 Pro features a thinner black heat spreader that is optional. Additionally, the firmware is different based on our sampling, and the Gammix S11 Pro comes in fewer capacities, just 256GB to 1TB, while the SX8200 Pro lineup recently expanded up to 2TB.

So, the choice is yours when it comes to aesthetics, but if you want something at 2TB, you’re going to have to go to the SX8200 Pro or something else. Interestingly, the S11 Pro is priced well and costs less than the SX8200 Pro at the 1TB price point at the time of writing, but the lower capacities are priced slightly higher than the SX8200 Pro.

Specifications

Advertised sequential performance numbers come in at up to 3.5/3.0GB/s read/write, while 4K random performance can hit upwards of up to 390,000 / 380,000 IOPS read/write. The endurance ratings don’t improve with the move from the S11’s SM2262 to the S11 Pro’s new SM226EN controller. The 1TB model we are testing today is rated to write up to 640TB before it goes out of warranty, but even with a lengthy 5-year warranty, you’re likely to run out of time before you hit a write cycle wall.

Feature-wise, the Gammix S11 Pro supports the standard stuff like S.M.A.R.T. data reporting, Trim, and support for Format NVM/secure erase commands. It also has LDPC ECC, end-to-end data path protection, and a RAID engine built in to maintain data integrity. Of course, there is a pseudo-SLC write cache as well, where the TLC is programmed to dynamically operate in an SLC mode, which helps improve write performance as well as reads from data still in the cache. 

A Closer Look

Adata’s XPG Gammix S11 Pro is an M.2 2280 form-factor SSD that connects to the host via a PCIe 3.0 x4 link and communicates via the NVMe 1.3 protocol. Our 1TB review sample has a double-sided PCB design, meaning that there are components on each side of it.

Unlike others, Adata was clever to place the spec sticker on the backside of the device as to not hinder its looks. With that flashy red and black heatsink on top of a black PCB, Adata hit a home run with the aesthetics. This drive is significantly better looking than most M.2’s out there.

Silicon Motion’s SMI SM2262EN is an 8-channel NVMe controller that utilizes a DRAM cache to accelerate access to the Flash Translation Layer (FTL). This, in turn, helps improve flash management processes and reduce latency compared to some of the newer DRAMless devices in the market. The DRAM cache is split between two 512MB NANYA DDR3L DRAM packages on our Gammix S11 Pro, just like the SX8200 Pro.

Additionally, connected to this NVMe controller are also four NAND packages, two on each side of the PCB. The new S11 Pro features less over-provisioning than the S11 before it, so instead of access to just 960GB, you get the full 1024GB, or what Windows reports as 953.85GB available to you in disk management.

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Comparison Products

Today, we pit the Adata XPG Gammix S11 Pro against a bunch of competing high-end drives. This includes its near-identical twins, the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro and Mushkin Pilot-E, the Samsung 970 EVO Plus and 970 PRO, WD Black SN750, as well as the more affordable Corsair Force MP510 and Intel SSD 660p. On top of this, we added in the super expensive Intel Optane SSD 905p in addition to some more budget-sensible options such as Crucial’s SATA-based https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-optane-ssd-905p,5600.html and a WD Black HDD for good measure.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood benchmark is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

For those who prioritize fast game load times, the S11 Pro achieved a very fast time on this test. Intel’s Optane 905p takes first place and the Samsung 970 Pro took second, but the Adata S11 Pro’s fastest total load time of 18.55 seconds, outperformed the SX8200 Pro by a fraction of a second and got it third place overall.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom 50GB block of data. Our data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. We copy the files to a new folder and then follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5 GB file.

In contrast to its game loading results, Adata’s S11 Pro copied the 50GB test folder at a rate of about 100 MBps slower than the SX8200 Pro. But the Mushkin Pilot drive trails by another 27 MBps. This ranks the S11 Pro sixth overall in copy performance.

Large file read performance is also slower. Instead of reading at about 2.2 GBps like the SX8200 Pro or 2 GBps like the Pilot-E, the S11 Pro read the 6.5GB test file at 1.9GB/s. This ranks it eighth overall, though it still outperforms the Intel SSD 660p, MX500, and the WD Black HDD significantly.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

It seems that the SX8200 Pro has some faster-performing firmware than that of the S11 Pro. But overall, the S11 Pro is still a high-ranking drive. The S11 Pro scored sixth place and ties the Corsair Force MP510. It outperformed the Pilot-E and WD Black SN750 this time, is almost three times faster than the MX500, and absolutely destroys the HDD’s performance.  

SYSmark 2014 SE

Like PCMark, SYSmark uses real applications to measure system performance. SYSmark takes things much further, however. It utilizes fourteen different applications to run real workloads with real data sets to measure how overall system performance impacts the user experience. BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 SE installs a full suite of applications for its tests, which include Microsoft Office, Google Chrome, Corel WinZip, several Adobe software applications, and GIMP. That also makes it a great test to measure the amount of time it takes to install widely-used programs after you install a fresh operating system.

SYSmark reiterates what we have been seeing. The S11 Pro scores up there with the best, but the SX8200 Pro edges away ever so slightly with higher highs. The S11 Pro comes in fifth place overall, just points behind the Samsungs and ahead of the Pilot-E and WD Black SN750. And, compared to a standard HDD, it isn’t even a fair fight. You’re at a significant disadvantage with an HDD running your OS and applications.

Trace Testing – SPECworkstation 3

Like PCMark 8, SPECworkstation 3 is a trace-based benchmark, but it is designed to push the system harder by measuring workstation performance in professional applications. The full suite consists of more than 30 workloads, but we've opted to only run the storage benchmark which uses only 15 of them and categorizes the results into 5 market segments for scoring: Media & Entertainment, Product Development, Life Sciences, Energy, and General Operations.

While testing with light workloads revolving around consumer-based use, the S11 Pro usually fell behind the SX8200 Pro ever so slightly. However, in SPECworkstation 3, we can see the opposite occurs. The S11 Pro lands fourth place here, just behind the Samsung 970s and far ahead of the Mushkin Pilot-E. It seems the S11 Pro can better withstand prosumer workloads and delivers more consistent performance.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

In ATTO the S11 Pro’s read performance was within a few MBps of the SX8200 Pro, and writes were a bit slower. Overall, the Adata S11 Pro hit about 3.4/2.9 GBps read/write speeds.

Synthetic Testing - iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool that vendors often use to measure the performance of their devices.

The S11 Pro was able to do a little better in testing with iometer. Read performance peaked at 3.5 GBps, while write remained about the same at 2.9 GBps. At QD1, the S11 Pro shows off some of the fastest response times in the whole group, save for the Intel Optane 905p. Even averaging QD1-4, this drive proves to be one of the fastest consumer SSDs available. And, at a high QD of 128, random performance maxes out at about 365,000 / 412,000 read/write IOPS.

Sustained Sequential Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement a pseudo-SLC cache buffer, which is a fast area of SLC-programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the pSLC cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the pSLC buffer and performance after the buffer is saturated.

Like Adata’s SX8200 Pro, the S11 Pro has a large write cache, but after extensive writing, performance can degrade significantly and lead to inconsistency. The S11 Pro’s cache was able to sustain writing at 2.9 GBps for a total of 162GB of data before performance degraded to an average of 930 MBps. However, beyond 670GB written, performance degraded once more to an average of 540 MBps.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.

The S11 Pro’s power consumption is a bit more restrained than the SX8200 Pro. This could be the reasoning behind its slightly slower file copy results. Nevertheless, the S11 Pro, consumed a similar amount of power on average as Mushkin’s Pilot-E. With an average of 220 MBps per watt consumed, it lands second place on the efficiency chart here, closely on the heels of WD’s Black SN750. Sipping just 12mW of power at idle with ASPM enabled, it is rather efficient when idling, too.

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Whether you're trying to upgrade from your SATA-based SSD to a faster NVMe drive or looking for a new one to add to your next gaming build, be sure to give Adata’s XPG Gammix S11 Pro a good look. Based on our experience with it, it's easy to recommend.

The drive looks great with the blacked-out PCB and sleek red-and-black heatsink. In other words, it looks just as fast as it is and would be a fine aesthetic addition to many builds. Surprisingly, though, its performance is tuned a bit differently than the SX8200 Pro’s and closer to the Mushkin Pilot-E, or in-between the two during most tasks.

While each of Adata’s Pro SSDs are comprised of the same components, they feature different firmware. This led to some differences in performance during testing, where the SX8200 Pro outclassed the S11 Pro under light workloads, and even during our transfer tests. But, the S11 Pro outperformed its sibling drive during heavier prosumer workloads and was more consistent. And, it was is slightly more efficient, making it the second most efficient overall in in our test pool. That said, if you primarily car about gaming, most NVMe SSDs perform practically the same.

The S11 Pro also priced competitively, and Adata backs the S11 Pro with a 5-year warranty and outfits it with similar endurance as most top-ranking SSDs. The company also includes support via an SSD toolbox and Acronis True Image disk imaging software for free.

In short, Adata’s XPG Gammix S11 Pro offers a lot of performance for not a whole lot more than most entry-level SSDs. It sure as heck is a lot cheaper than the WD Black SN750 and Samsung 970 EVO Plus, which makes it a great value for those looking to balance speed and budget. That said, HP's SSD EX950 is quite similar and is now selling for $10 less. And the Phison E12-powered Corsair Force MP510 is just $125 at this time. But these drives have no heatsinks included. So, if you are trying to pinch pennies while attaining some of the highest NVMe speeds you can, there are some alternatives. But if you want all those things plus good looks, this ADATA drive is tough to beat.

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Mushkin’s Pilot-E takes flight

Mushkin’s top-tier M.2 NVMe SSD is finally available. Like the lower-end Pilot, we reviewed a few months back, Mushkin’s new Pilot-E brings some heat with it, not only because of its competitive pricing. This variant features an updated NVMe controller for even better performance and efficiency.

Unlike the company’s Helix-L, an entry-level DRAMless SSD, the Pilot-E was built for speed. At the heart of Mushkin’s Pilot-E is one of the fastest NVMe controllers available, Silicon Motion’s SM2262EN. The SM2262EN features a DRAM-based architecture with eight NAND channels that link up to some of Micron’s 64-layer 3D TLC. Together, this combination is rated to hit some impressive speeds -- up to 3.5GBps read and 3.1GBps write.

It is actually very similar in design to both the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro and HP’s SSD EX950 overall. Our sample even features a black PCB, which improves the looks of the device dramatically over the base Pilot before it. But what helps to differentiate the Pilot-E from these two high-performance competitors as well as many other alternatives is the inclusion of hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption support. If you have sensitive data or just want to keep your files secure in case you lose your device, this feature will help keep it away from prying eyes.

Specifications

The Pilot-E is available in capacities of 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. Priced at $138.99, the 1TB is the sweet spot when looking to get the best price per GB. In terms of random performance, the Pilot-E is rated to deliver up to 344,000 read IOPS and 358,000 write IOPS, depending on the capacity.

Along with high performance, this SSD also offers competitive endurance figures. At 500GB, it's rated for up to 350TB written and up to 650TB at the 1TB capacity. But the 2TB capacity takes the cake as the most enduring device in the line-up with a rating of up to 1,300TB. Unfortunately, while endurance is high, Mushkin outfits the Pilot-E with a shorter than average 3-year warranty

Additionally, the Pilot-E is covered by M.E.D.S., Mushkin’s Enhanced Data-protection Suite. This is just marketing speech for some of the controller’s various management features, like end-to-end data path protection, LDPC error correction code, and an endurance-improving data-shaping algorithm. Additionally, the controller supports StaticDataRefresh to ensure data performance and integrity over time, as well as wear-leveling algorithms to help improve the NAND’s lifespan.

And there’s also S.M.A.R.T. data reporting, and NVMe Deallocate function support (NVMe equivalent of TRIM command), and support for the Format NVM / secure erase command to wipe the drive clean of any data.  

Software and Accessories

The Pilot-E lacks software support and any accessories, save for a Mushkin Enhanced sticker.

A Closer Look

Aesthetically, the Pilot-E is a step up from the Pilot it succeeds. Our 1TB sample comes in an M.2 2280 form factor with components on both sides of the black PCB, accented with a black and blue sticker over top. This SSD will blend in with more gaming systems than the Pilot ever could.

The overall design is different from previous SN2262EN-based SSDs we reviewed. Rather than set close to the M.2 connector, the NVMe controller sits more centered on the PCB, with the DRAM lying between the two. As well, the NAND is arranged in a different layout on the PCB: Two NAND packages lay horizontal and two vertical.

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1TB Performance Results

Comparison Products

Today, the Pilot-E gets thrown into the ring with some of the top mainstream SSDs out there, as well as a few value options. From Samsung, we’ve included both the 970 PRO and 970 EVO Plus. Both utilize Samsung’s Phoenix NVMe controller, but the PRO features 64L MLC V-NAND while the EVO Plus has 9xL TLC V-NAND. Also included is WD’s Black SN750, boasting an in-house 8 channel NVMe controller and Toshiba BiCS3 64L TLC. Corsair’s Force MP510 represents one of the many Phison E12 based SSDs out and Adata’s XPG SX8200 Pro is the Pilot-E’s direct competitor. Additionally, we threw in Intel’s best value NVMe SSD, the 660p as well as its ridiculously expensive and fast Optane 905P. Finally, we threw in an Adata’s XPG SX6000 Pro and Crucial’s MX500 for comparison sake with lower-end SSD options.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood benchmark is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

Silicon Motion’s NVMe controllers seem to have some of the fastest 4K read performance. Thanks to this, the Mushkin Pilot-E is able to attain a fast total load time of 19.05 seconds. This lands it 5^th place overall and ranks it much faster than most SSDs.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom 50GB block of data. Our data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. We copy the files to a new folder and then follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5 GB file.

When it comes to copying 50GB of files, Adata’s SX8200 Pro has the upper hand. With an average throughput of 749MBps, the Mushkin Pilot-E is 17% slower. Still, it is significantly faster than the Corsair Force MP510 and the entry-level competitors. Just as well, when reading back our 6.5GB test file, the Pilot-E’s read performance is nearly 200MBps slower than the Adata and ties the Intel Optane 905P. Overall, it ranks 6^th on these charts.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

With a score of 5,099 points and an average throughput of 678MBps, the Pilot-E scores 6^th place overall. Here it outranked the WD Black SN750 with its faster random performance, but the Adata, Corsair, and Samsung’s 970 series all outrank it. Overall, the Pilot-E will provide more than ample performance for your average home and office applications.

Trace Testing – SPECworkstation 3

Like PCMark 8, SPECworkstation 3 is a trace-based benchmark, but it is designed to push the system harder by measuring workstation performance in professional applications. The full suite consists of more than 30 workloads, but we've opted to only run the storage benchmark which uses only 15 of them and categorizes the results into 5 market segments for scoring: Media & Entertainment, Product Development, Life Sciences, Energy, and General Operations.

Intel’s Optane SSD 905P blows all its competitors out of the water in this test. With its ultra-low latency memory, nothing can touch it. Here, Mushkin’s Pilot-E surpasses the WD Black SN750 in application performance, though this time by just a hair. With a final score of 3.47 points, it will provide adequate performance for workstation use. But the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro, the Corsair Force MP510, and the Samsung drives all prove to be slightly better for the task. 

Synthetic Testing - ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

Overall, read and write performance lags behind slightly compared to the test pool’s average, but that doesn’t stop Mushkin’s Pilot-E from hitting speeds of 3.35GBps read and 3.00GBps write in ATTO.

Synthetic Testing - iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool that vendors often use to measure the performance of their devices.

Mushkin’s Pilot-E delivered competitive read and write results when testing it with iometer. Under sequential tests, the SSD averaged about 3.5GBps read and 3GBps write throughput. 4K random response times were quite fast too. But once again, the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro shows that there is still some room for improvement. Averaging the SSD’s queue depth 1-4 performance, we can see that it outranks the WD Black, Intel 660p, and SX6000 Pro, but the SX8200 Pro gets in an additional 1,500 IOPS. As well, under peak load, the SX8200 Pro can deliver almost 100,000 more read IOPS and the Pilot-E.

Sustained Sequential Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement a pseudo-SLC cache buffer, which is a fast area of SLC-programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the pSLC cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the pSLC buffer and performance after the buffer is saturated.

The Pilot-E’s SLC write cache isn’t as large as Adata’s. While both drives are neck and neck writing over 160GB of data within only a minute, after that, the SX8200 Pro starts to leave the Pilot-E behind. While the Adata maintains over 1GBps write speeds once the cache fills and then 615MBps at its slowest, the Pilot-E degrades to an average of 675MBps and then later just over 400MBps as it folds over SLC data to TLC cells. Overall, this write performance should not leave you disappointed for most day-to-day use.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.

The Pilot-E sips very little power at idle, just 12mW when ASPM is enabled in our BIOS, similar to other Silicon Motion based SSDs. It wasn’t quite as fast as the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro during our file copy test, but on average it consumes less power, which propels the Pilot-E to second place on our efficiency chart. Unlike the Adata, this Mushkin drive isn’t wasting power trying for the best performance; it's quite balanced. 

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Conclusion

Compared to most other Silicon Motion SM2262EN based SSDs, Mushkin has chosen an alternative PCB design we have yet to come across on other drives. Mushkin places the Pilot-E’s controller closer to the NAND rather than the host connector. But this difference in controller and DRAM placement may have led to some subtle performance differences.

In testing, it was clear that while the Pilot-E performed admirably overall, under our application tests it lagged behind the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro time and time again. And, when it came to efficiency, the Pilot-E’s performance leaned more towards optimized power consumption rather than raw speed.

The Pilot-E features hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption, a handy high-class security feature many other drives lack, which provides no penalty to performance if you opt to enable it.  It's a great addition to cater to those security-conscious people upgrading their storage.

Competitors like the Samsung 970 EVO Plus and Kingston’s recently reviewed KC2000 feature this as well. The Pilot-E’s main advantage against those two is price. But while it is much less costly than these two at the time of writing, it is not without its drawbacks or lack of other competition.

Its value is weakened by its shorter-than-average 3-year warranty coverage. As well, Mushkin’s product lacks any value-add software support such as an SSD toolbox or cloning software. But these are minor complaints. The Pilot-E will function the same regardless.

If you are not in need of the added security feature, the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro may be a better buy. While the Adata is roughly $10 more at the 1TB capacity, it offers bleeding-edge burst performance that outranks the Pilot-E and even surpasses the Samsung 970 EVO Plus and WD Black in various workloads. Not only that, those few extra dollars get you a slick heat spreader to help cool the device and a longer 5-year warranty.

Alternatively, the HP SSD EX950 is priced practically the same as the Pilot-E and it comes with a 5-year warranty, too. And, if you are looking to spend a bit less, the popular Phison E12-based SSDs like the Silicon Power A34A80, similar to the Corsair Force MP510, is a great value at just $115.  

Overall, the Pilot-E is a solid choice if you are on the hunt for your next OS drive or just wanting to add more high-speed storage to your build. It scores style points with its black PCB, and while it isn’t the fastest SSD on the shelf, it is still plenty fast, with impressive endurance rathings, and quite efficient too.

Photo Credits: Tom's Hardware

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Time for Lift Off

Texas-based Mushkin may have started out making enthusiast-focused memory, but these days the company offers a broad array of SSDs as well. Whether it's in the standard 2.5-inch form factor, or the slimmed-down and often speedy M.2 drives that have become prevalent in the past few years, Mushkin has an SSD at the speed and capacity to fit almost anyone’s storage needs. And if speed is your need, the NVMe Mushkin Pilot is the drive to choose.

Mushkin should soon be pushing out a newer Pilot-E drive. But as of this writing, the Pilot is company's current speed-focused drive. While its design is last-gen, performance is still very competitive, and the drive is all about competitive pricing.

Rated performance is respectable at up to 2,710/1,775 MBps of read/write throughput, but not bleeding edge. SSDs like the Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus and WD’s Black SN750 easily surpass it in raw performance numbers of up to 3.5GBps. But unlike those two companies, Mushkin doesn’t own a NAND fab, nor does it have the ability to bring to market an SSD controller of its own. Instead, the company is bound to other companies such as Micron for NAND and Silicon Motion for controllers.

But, even with this burden, Mushkin’s reputation to deliver low cost and quality products isn’t hampered. The Pilot is actually a good value for those looking to save a few bucks on their storage costs. While Mushkin has to purchase components that are outside of its production capabilities, the Mushin Pilot is still significantly cheaper than those costly previously mentioned drives.

The Pilot features Micron’s 64L TLC NAND flash and Silicon Motion’s SM2262 NVMe SSD controller, the same one found in the Intel 760p. It lacks Intel’s custom firmware, but even with stock firmware from Silicon Motion, the Pilotx is able to do rather well for itself. This is not the latest controller from the company, but it still has enough grunt to keep up with most consumer workload demands.

Specifications

The Mushkin Pilot has been available for quite a few months and all capacities, ranging from 120GB up to 2TB, are available for purchase at rather competitive prices. The 500GB and 1TB models come in at roughly $0.14 per GB, making them the best value out of the bunch.

Performance figures on our 500GB sample are rated for up to 2,680/1,755MBps read/write; the others vary depending on the specific capacity. Random IOPS performance also varies by capacity. The 500GB model is the highest rated, with figures of up to 335K/277K IOPS read/write.

Unlike most SSDs out these days, the Pilot doesn’t have any official endurance ratings that we could find. So, significant write endurance shouldn't hold back its 3-year warranty coverage.

Feature-wise, Mushkin says the Pilot is covered by its Mushkin Enhanced Data-protection Suite -- M.E.D.S. for short. This covers the built-in LDPC error correction code, end-to-end data path protection, a data shaping algorithm to improve endurance, StaticDataRefresh to ensure data integrity over time, and wear-leveling to help improve the NAND’s lifespan.

As well, the drive boasts standard features like S.M.A.R.T. data reporting, Trim, and support for Format NVM /secure erase commands.

A Closer Look

Mushkin’s Pilot is an M.2 2280 form factor SSD. It connects to the host over a PCIe 3.0 x4 link and communicates via the NVMe protocol. The 500GB sample we're reviewing today features a double-sided PCB design, which means there are components on each side. Overall, the drive isn’t too aesthetically pleasing, with a green PCB and a blue sticker on top. But on the bright side, the components are top quality.

The Silicon Motion SMI SM2262 controller utilizes a DRAM cache for the FTL layer, which is split between two 256MB NANYA DDR3L DRAM packages. Connected to this 8-channel NVMe controller are also four NAND packages, two on each side of the PCB. The full capacity isn’t available for use, rather there is a bit of over-provisioning to help maintain higher performance levels. The total usable space to the end user once formatted is 465GB.

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500GB Performance Results

Comparison Products

Entering the ring against the Mushkin Pilot we have a few other popular 500GB class SSDs. For starters, there's the more-expensive Intel 760p, Adata SX8200 Pro, and Samsung 970 EVO Plus. As well, we have results from the more affordable MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro, WD Blue SN500, and Crucial P1. Additionally, we threw in results from a Samsung 860 EVO for good measure to see just how much -- or how little -- these high-performance NVMe devices outperform a SATA SSD.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

Mushkin’s Pilot eats through PCMark 8 and spits out a score of 5,064 points and an average bandwidth of 465MBps. This easily outperforms the Crucial P1, which features QLC NAND, as well as the SATA based 860 EVO. The WD Blue SN500 gives the Pilot some tough competition as well as the 760P, which utilizes a similar NAND controller, but Intel’s own firmware.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood benchmark is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

As it is with most Silicon Motion-based SSDs, the Mushkin Pilot delivers one of the fastest total load times. While it may seem slower than most of the other PCIe 3.0 x4 devices on paper due to lower specs, real-world performance is quite impressive. At 20.19 seconds, it even outperforms the Samsung 970 EVO Plus, for a fraction of the price.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom 50GB block of data. Our data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. We copy the files to a new folder and then follow up with a read test of a newly-written 6GB file.

File transfer performance is also very impressive. Again, while it seems like an underdog, an average transfer speed of 337MBps says otherwise.

Here, the Pilot scored second place in our file transfer test, second only to the Intel Optane based 905P. Read performance could have used some improvement, however. With a read speed of 1.6GBps, the Pilot scored 6th place here. The Adata SX8200 Pro, which flaunts the newer SMI SM22562EN controller, is capable of reading at a faster pace of about 1.9GBps.

SYSmark 2014 SE

Like PCMark, SYSmark uses real applications to measure system performance. SYSmark takes things much further, however. It utilizes fourteen different applications to run real workloads with real data sets to measure how overall system performance impacts the user experience. BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 SE installs a full suite of applications for its tests, which includes Microsoft Office, Google Chrome, Corel WinZip, several Adobe software applications, and GIMP. That also makes it a great test to measure the amount of time it takes to install widely-used programs after you install a fresh operating system.

SYSmark installed in a respectable time like most other SSDs of the Pilot's caliber. Here it ranked 5th overall in both install time and total responsiveness score once the benchmark completed. With a score of 1706 points, the Pilot proves to be quite competitive in real-world applications, outperforming the WD Blue SN500 and Crucial P1 with ease. Compared to a standard HDD, it's in another league. If you have not yet upgraded to an SSD, this test really shows what you are missing out in terms of user experience.

ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

Mushkin’s Pilot flaunts read and write speeds of up to 2.7/1.7GBps in ATTO. Most newer drives are now pushing past 3GBps, but these are still rather respectable speeds. That said, Intel was able to push the SM2262 a little more with read performance of up to 3.2GBps.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a simple and easy to use file size benchmarking tool.

Mirroring the performance seen in ATTO, the Pilot delivers sequential performance of about 2.7/1/7GBps read/write when at a high queue depth. Bringing down the queue depth to a single request reduces performance to about 2.0/1.5GBps read/write, which is still pretty good and roughly four times faster than any SATA SSD.

4K random performance isn’t the best, but with up to 235K/295K IOPS read/write performance, the Pilot is much more capable than any HDD or SATA SSD. At a low QD of 1, it delivers 14K/41K IOPS read/write, which is again, much better than anything in the SATA field.

Sustained Sequential Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement an SLC cache buffer, which is a fast area of SLC-programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the SLC cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We hammer the SSDs with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the SLC buffer and performance after the buffer is saturated.

Mushkin’s Pilot features SLC caching to help boost write performance, but just how much does it help? Overall, the Pilot comes in sixth place, just behind the SX8200 Pro. But it wasn’t until it wrote for 5 minutes straight that the SX8200 Pro overtook it. Before that, the Mushin Pilot actually absorbed more data at a faster rate. This helps to explain the high performance we saw earlier in our 50GB file copy test. The Mushkin Pilot’s SLC cache implementation is one of the best for most consumer workloads.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.

Not only is it quite fast, but the Mushkin Pilot is quite power efficient to boot. It consumed an average of 3 watts during our 50GB file transfer, and that helped to propel it to second place in efficiency overall. Idle power consumption is very well regulated too. With ASPM disabled, we measure it consuming 657mW of power, but when it was enabled, that number dropped to just 11mW.

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Conclusion

Mushkin has a reputation of delivering quality and competitive components, and the Pilot carries on that legacy. But that doesn’t exclude it from criticism.

Aesthetically, the Mushkin Pilot is one ugly drive. With a green PCB and bright blue sticker, it most definitely will clash with many of the good-looking motherboards and systems being built today. But this is nothing an aftermarket heatsink won’t remedy. And of course laptop users or desktop builders without a case window won't care how the drive looks.

Currently, Mushkin doesn’t offer any value-add software like an SSD toolbox, nor any cloning software like some others do. As well, the Pilot comes with a 3-year warranty, while many other premium drives offer  five years of coverage. But, while the Pilot comes with a shorter warranty, customer service from an American-based company helps differentiate Muskin's drive, at least if you live in the US.

Performance wise, the Pilot isn’t bleeding edge. It only hits 2.7/1.7GBps read and write speeds. But even so, in most real-world use it can keep up with some of the best. In SYSmark it outperformed the WD Blue SN500, Crucial P1, and BPX Pro and was within a few points of the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro. Furthermore, it bested every other competitor in our 50GB file transfer test, through its read performance could have been better. The Intel 760p with a similar component layout was able to read the 6GB file much faster. Still, the Pilot doesn’t disappoint.

With such performance, and competitive pricing, Mushin’s Pilot delivers on value. Our 500GB sample comes in at just $72 and the 1TB model just $135. While that is a few dollars more than the Crucial P1 and WD Blue SN500, it's cheaper than the SATA based Samsung 860 EVO, and significantly cheaper than the WD Black SN750 and Samsung 970 EVO Plus. The Pilot is great for those looking to break free of SATA and save a few bucks while still attaining respectable NVMe speed.

Image Credits: Tom's Hardware

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Back at CES 2019, Mushkin unveiled a new M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD in the Helix-L. The new SSD promised NVMe level performance and a reasonable price point, though at the time pricing was not available. Today they have announced availability as well as pricing with the 1TB model coming in at $120, 500GB is $63, while the 250GB drive is $43. The drives are said to reach speeds up to 2110 MB/s reads and 1700 MB/s writes (1TB model) offering users much faster than SATA performance at closer to SATA pricing.

The Helix-L uses the Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller, SLC caching and Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology instead of an integrated DRAM cache. In a nutshell, HMB technology uses system memory to cache the translation table instead of using the more costly (and better performing) DRAM cache. This allows companies to save money and offer a less expensive, though typically slower, NVMe based storage.

Speeds on the smaller capacity drives are a bit slower on reads with writes taking the more notable performance hit (as per usual). The 250GB model is rated at 2010/1250 MB/s (R/W) with the 500GB model reaching 2105/1670 MB/s. IOPS reach up to 240,000/260,000 IOPS on the 500GB and 1TB models while the 250GB is slower on reads but features the same write IOPS at 200,000/260,000 respectively. A more detailed specifications table for each capacity is below. 

Other features on the Helix-L include Mushkin’s M.E.D.S data protection suite which has built-in LDPC ECC, data shaping for increased endurance, global wear leveling to even program/erase counts, and NVMe deallocate functionality (essentially TRIM for an NVMe drive). Mushkin’s MTBF on the Helix-L is 1.5 million hours with up to 600TB TBW (on the 1TB drive) while being backed by a three-year warranty.

All drives are available now on Amazon or Newegg and priced at or below the MSRP.

Features & Specifications

Mushkin passed along a dual-module 8GB (that is, 16GB total) kit of its Redline DDR4-2666 memory just in time for our Z370 launch. (Specifically, this kit is part number MRA4U266GHHF8GX2.) Alas, none of the boards we originally tested at the time of that launch was (by our admittedly aggressive memory-overclocker standards) “good enough” to use as a test platform. Months passed before we finally settled on a board that’s still a little shy on memory overclocking compared to the Z270 platform that preceded it. But, hey, at least we get to test with a faster Coffee Lake CPU...

Rated at DDR4-2666 with a JEDEC-beating CAS 16 latency, MRA4U266GHHF8GX2 uses Mushkin’s classic “Frostbyte”-style heat spreaders.

The full primary timing set of 16-17-17-36 beats standard DDR4-2666 CAS 17 timings while retaining industry-standard 1.20V DDR4 voltage. But those improved timings still require the builder to enable XMP mode. Without enabling XMP, the memory defaults to DDR4-2133 CAS 15. Let's get down to testing it.

Specifications

Like all Mushkin DRAM, this DDR4-2666 16GB dual-channel kit is covered by its lifetime-replacement limited warranty.

Comparison Products

Our greatest concern for fairness was to make sure the Redline 16GB DDR4-2666 would be compared to other kits in the same two-8GB-module configuration. But notice below that one thing remains different for one set: The DDR4-3000 kit has eight 512MB ICs on each side rather than eight 1024GB ICs on just one side. Eight ICs make up a 64-bit “rank,” so that for each memory channel, one “dual-rank” module performs similarly to two single-rank modules.

Intel’s memory controller works better with four ranks than with two. Because this performance difference caused confusion in a previous review, we’ve added the “dual rank” tag here for clarity.

We’re expanding outward from our Corsair DDR4-4600 review by switching to a board that supports four DIMMs. MSI’s Z370 Godlike Gaming doesn’t have any memory overclocking advantages over the smaller board used in that review, but it has similar performance scaling and can push several of our kits past DDR4-4000. We’re also holding over the hardware from that review, including our GeForce GTX 1080 and Toshiba/OCZ NVMe SSD.

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Benchmark Results & Final Analysis

We start today’s review with a little latency tuning, to find out just how quick each module can be set without losing stability. As indicated, the Mushkin Redline 16GB kit can be tweaked one cycle lower than its default 16-17-17 timings. Two of the other kits will also be tested at DDR4-2666. Unfortunately, the motherboard could not automatically configure a workable set of secondary and tertiary timings to make the DDR4-3200 work at DDR4-2666. (Additional testing showed that the board would configure DDR4-2400 through DDR4-2800 ratios using its DDR4-2133 timing table, and DDR-2933 upward using its DDR4-3200 settings.)

Because the test board doesn’t support any of our modules at DDR4-4200 or above, we put the pedal to the metal using 19-21-21-42 timings at an Intel-accepted 1.35V. The Redline DDR4-2666 wouldn’t overclock to our next “test step” of DDR4-3200, so it’s competing based mostly on value pricing and latency optimization.

Sandra Memory Bandwidth shows the dual-rank kit outperforming everything else at any given speed. The lower-density DRAM ICs required to fill an 8GB module out with 16 “chips” are getting less common, however, and stepping up to higher-capacity modules (16GB-per-DIMM) has become the best alternative to finding “dual-rank” DIMMs.

With modest data rates and relatively poor timings (even when pushed to its limits), Redline DDR4-2666 will likely appeal only to buyers on tight budgets. Let’s see how this plays out in real-world apps.

F1 2015 is only GPU-limited when used with low-end graphics solutions such as onboard devices. Breaking past that boundary, it becomes CPU-constrained only on the lowest-clocked parts. Its memory bottleneck is most significant when performance parts are used throughout the system, and it’s there that we find that dual-rank is the better option, followed by optimized timings, followed by higher data rates.

Metro: Last Light Redux is a better example of how typical games respond to memory, as the game usually scales back only with extremely slow modules installed. Keeping it in the benchmark set helps us keep our perspective: Very few games will benefit in the way that F1 2015 does.

Blender’s CPU render is another application that punishes only poor memory configurations, and it shows the settings to be "good enough." If you’re using these kind of applications, you’re better off saving your money and settling for the DDR4-2666.

7-Zip is affected by various things including CPU, storage, and DRAM. Our super-fast CPU and NVMe drive lets the program lean hard on RAM, where the performance scaling is similar to that of the game F1 2015. The bar scaling is the opposite of performance scaling, though, since less time means more performance in timed applications.

Here’s the payoff: The Redline DDR4-2666 kit isn’t cheap, but it’s cheap enough to knock the DDR4-3200 and DDR4-3866 out of the value race at both XMP and latency-optimized settings. The only configuration that beats it on value uses a pair of harder-to-find dual-rank 8GB modules.

Mushkin’s DDR4-2666 delivers decent-enough value that it earns a thumbs-up for money-minded buyers. We can recommend it to anyone looking to save a few bucks while running most applications that aren't affected greatly by higher data rates and lower latency settings.

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LAS VEGAS, NV -- Mushkin tapped Taiwan SSD controller designer Silicon Motion, Inc for its 2018 line up. At CES 2018, was saw the full product line coming to market in the coming months from this legendary enthusiast brand.

On tap are three NVMe products using the latest 1.3 protocol. The SM2262EN, SM2262, and SM2263XT DRAM-less HMB controllers fill the NVMe roster. Mushkin has every new SMI controller in the lineup expect for the mainstream SM2263. The company will have a heavy focus on the M.2 form factor—even the SATA AHCI Triactor 3DL will also ship in a M.2, but the new Triactor 3DX will feature a standard 2.5" design.

Mushkin was the only manufacturer at the show with a SM2262EN on display (that we saw; it's a big show). The SM2262EN is a true premium class NVMe controller with its sights set on the Samsung 960 Pro and rumored 980 (OEM PM981 Review Here). Mushkin tells us to expect up to 3,500 / 3,000 MB/s sequential read / write speeds from the Pilot-E. Random performance reaches as high as 370,000 / 300,000 IOPS read / write with capacities lifted up to 2TB in a double-sided M.2 2280 for factor.

The Pilot NVMe 1.3 SSD uses the more mainstream SM2262 controller and also reaches up to 2TB. This drive shares the Pilot-E's random performance numbers but loses some sequential performance. With up to 3,000 / 1,900 sequential read / write speeds, the Pilot will still offer more performance than most NVMe SSDs shipping today. It will be interesting to see the price gap between these two speedy products.

The upcoming Helix-L uses the SMI SM2263XT DRAM-less architecture with Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology that was rolled out in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. We've tested the SM2263XT in the lab and were very impressed with the performance. Mushkin's implementation will ship in 120GB to 1TB sizes with up to 2,400 / 1,700 sequential read / write speeds. Random performance reaches as high as 280,000 IOPS read and 250,000 IOPS write speeds. If your system doesn't support HMB you will lose around 30,000 random read IOPS.

We cover HMB technology in our article but don't mind giving you a primer here. The manufacturers can use HMB to remove the DRAM from the SSD. The DRAM caches the map table on the SSD, where you data is at, the order, and so on. This new technology uses a small amount of your system memory (RAM) to cache the map table. The data passes through the PCIe bus with special instructions for the CPU to pass the data directly to RAM. The technology reduces the component costs by eliminating the memory on the SSD and making the SSD controller less complicated to design and manufacture.

Mushkin has two SATA products ready for release in 2018. The Triactor 3DX uses a SM2258 controller like the Crucial MX500 (review here). We will need to see how efficient Mushkin can implement an SLC cache for this series to know how well it performs in real-world consumer workloads. The Triactor 3DL uses the SMI SM2258XT DRAM-less controller that we've also tested but not with new 64-layer 3D NAND that increases the performance and endurance.

Mushkin CarbonEXT

The CarbonEXT uses a USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gb/s) to deliver up to 450 MB/s sequential read and write speeds. Mushkin expects flash to become cheap enough in 2018 for the technology to become viable for more users to replace spinning disk for every storage device in their personal arsenal. The external SSD market started with Kingston (HyperX Portable) and OCZ (ENYO) back in 2010. In 2018, the category may expand into the mainstream, but for that to happen the fabs will have to pump out low-cost flash in volumes we've never seen before.

Features & Specifications

The T-Force sub-brand is alive and kicking at Team Group, and the firm is finally taking on its DRAM competitors in the RGB arena. Night Hawk RGB modules have been around a few weeks, but it wasn’t until recently that Asus published an update to its Aura software (available using Asus Aura-enabled motherboards) that could control the RGB features of these modules. A beta version of the Aura software was available for earlier reviews, but we prefer to use software to which all users have access.

Specifications

The part number we received, TF2D416G3000HC16CDC01, comes in white, and runs at a DDR4-3000 CAS 16 as the name implies. Those timings are just a little relaxed by standards of the performance enthusiast market, where a cycle of latency for every 200 MHz of data rate (such as DDR4-3000 CAS 15) is quickly becoming the baseline.

The DDR4-3000 rating requires XMP mode to configure both its data rate and 16-18-18-38 timings at 1.35V. At 1.20V defaults, motherboards will configure these two 8GB modules at DDR4-2133 CAS 15. Even slower configurations are available within the SPD table to expand compatibility with troublesome platforms.

The Night Hawk RGB retail box includes two 53mm-tall (2.1”) modules and an installation manual. Also included, but not photographable, is Team Group’s Lifetime Warranty. You'll simply have to imagine it (or click the link).

The Night Hawk RGB ships with its LEDs programmed to Rainbow mode. Team Group does not include RGB software, although users of Asus motherboards can load that company's Aura software for some control over the lighting. While not as detailed as the settings of some of its competitors, we eventually got the modules to do what we wanted by happenstance after poking around the menu options for a while.

Comparison Products

The only set of competing RGB modules we had on hand were G.Skill’s DDR4-3600 four-DIMM set. All four modules are the same 8GB size and use the same single-sided configuration as those of the Night Hawk RGB being tested today, but four single-sided DIMMs have the performance advantage of providing the four ranks of addressable memory that our Kaby Lake test bed prefers.

Mushkin’s Redline Ridgeback DDR4-3200 has the closest matching DRAM IC compared to Night Hawk RGB, with its eight ICs occupying one side of each DIMM and configured as one rank, for a total of two ranks.

T-Force Dark ROG dual-rank DIMMs were specifically designed to exploit the four-rank preference of Kaby Lake processors by packing two ranks per double-sided DIMM. While it's the only set in today’s test to have an identical module count, data rate, timings, and capacity to the Night Hawk RGB, we have a feeling that the four-rank advantage will force Team Group to lose the performance race to itself.

Test System

Our latest memory test system exploits the stability of Asus’ ROG Maximus IX Hero to leverage the strong overclocking capability of Intel’s Core i7-7700K and the graphics bottleneck-smashing MSI GTX 1080 Armor O/C. Though the test bed has been designed to eliminate bottlenecks, test software was chosen to indicate a real-world performance experience.

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Benchmark Results & Final Analysis

With barely any flexibility to tighten timings, Mushkin’s Redline Ridgeback should prove a relatively easy mark for Night Hawk RGB to exceed. That still makes the new modules third-worst in tuning ability.

Night Hawk DDR4-3000 drops to fourth place in overclocking capability, though the difference between it, the Mushin DDR4-3200, and Team Group’s ROG DDR4-3000 is relatively small.

Amazingly, the Night Hawk RGB performed a little better at its rated (XMP) settings than at optimized DDR4-3200 timings. Perhaps that’s because the test motherboard de-optimized secondary and tertiary timings from a performance standpoint to provide better stability?

Lower is better in latency, and the Night Hawk RGB had the second-best latency reading at its DDR4-3200 optimized timings. That’s unusual given its mediocre bandwidth measurement, though the difference between its 18.5ns XMP setting and its 18.1ns at DDR4-3200 is relatively small.

F1 2015 is known to have memory bottlenecks, and the Night Hawk RGB’s best settings match only those of the other single-sided DIMMs in today’s test.

Metro Last Light is closer to the majority of games in that it has barely any preference for super fast RAM. It was in a race to the bottom with Mushkin’s similarly-configured DDR4-3200, and tied.

Blender also gets minimal improvement from super fast memory, though super slow RAM can do some damage. Though a single outlier score could be called a quirk, the Night Hawk RGB takes several one-second losses. On the other hand, a single-second loss would hardly be noticed in the real-life application of a three-minute render.

7-Zip file compression times appear strange, though somewhat close to those of the other single-sided, dual-DIMM kit in today’s test. It appears that double-sided, or four-DIMM, is the way to go in this test.

A basic performance-per-dollar analysis hurts kits where lighting or added capacity is a big part of the pricing scheme. The Trident Z has both twice the capacity, via twice the number of DIMMs, and RGB lighting.

When we adjust the performance-per-dollar rating to capacity, we still see the Trident Z RGB flailing for any sense of reasonable value against the Night Hawk RGB. Only Team Group’s own Dark ROG is capable of overtaking the value imparted by Night Hawk RGB’s relatively-reasonable price.

Crunching a few numbers, we find that Night Hawk Dark RGB modules would need to drop $16 in price to match the performance-value of the same manufacturer’s Dark ROG kit. The question remaining is whether the RGB lighting is worth that $16. And the answer for many buyers will likely be yes. At this point, I’d like to close this review with a value award. A far higher price for G.Skill’s Trident Z obviously isn’t competing for the same market, so that makes Night Hawk RGB a top-finishing value in RGB.

Unfortunately, Team Group has already pumped the idea of optimized performance via four-rank configuration in its Dark ROG memory. You’d want two Night Hawk RGB kits to achieve both the flash and dash on a Z270 motherboard. Still, value supremacy within a very narrow set of circumstances deserves, at a minimum, our stamp of approval.

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Introducing Redline Ridgeback DDR4-3200

What started as a memory series with high-priced heat spreaders to help overclockers expel heat, the lower voltage of DDR4 has allowed Mushkin to scale back its Ridgeback design to become little more than an aesthetic treatment. You still get Mushkin’s top rated Redline modules under the skin, it’s just that the skin need not be as elaborate when covering today’s lower voltage ICs.

I like to start off with names that people can remember, and Redline Ridgeback DDR4-3200 is easily remembered. Conversely, the model number MRB4U320LLLM8GX2 isn’t. Because this is the only currently available 16GB dual-channel kit of Ridgeback DDR4-3200, you probably won’t need to remember that model number.

Ridgeback DDR4-3200 comes with highly conservative CAS 20 timings, bucking the enthusiast trendline of 1 cycle latency for every 200 MHz of data rate that has brought us DDR4-3200 CAS 16, DDR3-1600 CAS 8, DDR2-800 CAS 4, and DDR-400 CAS 2. Benchmarks will determine how this impacts performance, and we'll also drive the modules through traditional overclocking and latency optimization routines to find out how much performance has been left in reserve.

Regardless of what some readers keep saying, CPU-Z remains a relatively useful program for displaying a module’s top four timing sets in an easy screen shot format when deployed on most motherboards. It accurately shows DDR4-3200 (1600 MHz clock) timings available using a motherboard’s XMP setting, along with the DDR4-2133 (1066 MHz clock) CAS 15 timings that most motherboards will use when XMP mode is disabled.

Standing up to 1.65” (42mm) tall and rated at 1.35V, Mushkin’s Redline Ridgeback DDR4-3200 16GB dual-channel kit carries a (limited) lifetime replacement warranty. As with most manufacturers, its liability exclusions mean that if a single-bit failure causes your nuclear reactor to melt down, the company will replace the defective module (assuming you can still get to it) but won’t pay to replace the reactor. That is, unless it’s a Mushkin Reactor.

Test Setup

Recent improvements in motherboard firmware and circuit layout that are designed to complement the latest CPU memory controller revisions have finally produced a test system capable of exceeding DDR4-4000 when using top modules, without significantly exceeding the 1.35V DIMM limit suggested by Intel. A newer graphics card and storage complete our latest upgrade.

Supplied for use in motherboard reviews, G.Skill’s 32GB four DIMM DDR4-3866 kit is the starting point for today’s review. Teamgroup’s DDR4-3600 fills the data rate gap between Mushkin’s DDR4-3200 and G.Skill’s DDR4-3866.

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Test Results And Final Analysis

Mushkin’s DDR4-3200 CAS 20 could have a tough time competing against Teamgroup’s DDR4-3600 and G.Skill’s DDR4-3866 for bandwidth, but we’re really hoping it is also able to prove its worth in our price-to-performance analysis. On the plus side, it is also able to support lower-than-rated timings, though both competitors share that capability.

In the overclocking test, Mushkin’s DDR4-3200 failed the DDR4-3600 stability test after 15 minutes. Dropping the motherboard to a 44x CPU multiplier and 34.66x DRAM ratio, a 103 MHz BCLK brought the Ridgeback kit to a stable DDR4-3570. (For those interested, a 34.66x DRAM ratio uses a 13x memory multiplier with a 4/3 memory controller to CPU BCLK ratio. DDR doubles the data rate of the resulting clock rate.)

The above test also shows a maximum CAS Latency value of 21 cycles. While this did help the Mushkin Redline Ridgeback overclock a little higher, the Trident-Z modules worked better at CAS 19-21-21, hence the (Max) label.

Sandra Memory Bandwidth shows a preference for four-DIMM kits on Kaby Lake (as inherited from Skylake), and the difference has historically been around 10%. Even if we were to reduce the Trident-Z bandwidth numbers by 10%, we can plainly see how its better data rate and better timings would keep it in the lead. Completely removing that bias, the T-Force Xtreme kit has a smaller lead.

Two modules often beat four in Sandra Memory Latency, and we see the T-Force Extreme with the least latency at optimized settings. The Redline Ridgeback kit also has two modules, but its lengthier latency settings put it behind in this measurement.

Our overclocked Core i7-7700K and GTX 1080 provide enough performance that we can finally see the deficits of slower RAM in a racing game, without relying upon low graphics setting that a serious gamer wouldn’t use. The Redline Ridgeback falls behind the T-Force Extreme.

Metro Last Light Redux shows less bias for memory bandwidth or timings, and the T-Force Xtreme DDR4-3600 barely beats the Redline Ridgeback DDR4-3200.

Blender’s CPU render barely responds to improved memory performance, and both the Mushkin DDR4-3200 and Teamgroup DDR4-3600 memory complete the render operation at three minutes, one second, using XMP settings.

File compression applications often benefit from improved memory performance, and the scaling in 7-Zip is quite impressive . . . for everything but the Redline Ridgeback kit.

Redline Ridgeback DDR4-3200 CAS 20 is a little pricey at around $170, which is comparable to the DDR4-3200 CAS 16 of several competitors. Even at its most recently spotted $180, Teamgroup’s DDR4-3600 barely costs a little more.

The last chart, Performance Per Gigabyte, primarily shows that G.Skill’s 4x 8GB set has enough performance to overcome its $30 price premium compared to two of Mushkin’s 2x 8GB sets.

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Yet another OEM known for making products other than peripherals is now making peripherals. At CES 2017, Mushkin teased its first gaming keyboard, the Carbon KB-001.  

It seems the company is going for the high-end with the Carbon KB-001, boasting that it’s made of CNC’d and aircraft-grade anodized brushed aluminum, and it stated that the PCB is a double fiberglass design. It enjoys a clean-looking top panel design, and on each side there’s a pair of red grills for, presumably, feet. There’s a permanent, small wrist rest area--a slope all along the front edge of the keyboard.

The Carbon KB-001 offers RGB lighting, and it appears as though there will be a monochrome variant available. Mushkin stated that the keyboard comes with Kailh Brown switches, and from the renders, it looks like those are standard switches, not clear-chassis RGBs. It’s unclear if other switch options will be available.

Other features on the full size 104-key Carbon KB-001 include n-key rollover, a Windows key lock, and a braided fiber cable.

And that’s about all we know for now. We’ve reached out for more information, but the company has so far neglected our repeated overtures. 

Mushkin laid out the early 2017 SSD roadmap from start to finish at CES 2017. In it, we found a heavy dose of Silicon Motion, Inc. (SMI) controllers paired with current and next generation flash technology. The company's role in the foreseeable future is as a value-centric provider of quality components that meet both the performance and price demands of the entry-level and mainstream shoppers.

The sole NVMe product in the lineup comes with "Helix" branding. The drive will ship in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and eventually a massive 2TB model. Mushkin will take this SMI SM2260 model to production with Micron 3D MLC NAND flash to increase performance and endurance. The performance specifications show up to 2,600MB/s sequential read and 1,100 MB/s sequential writes. We expect pricing to be competitive with other SM2260 products coming to a congested mainstream NVMe market.

Two existing SATA-based products will receive capacity updates in 2017. The first is the Reactor that we are so fond of in 1TB. The updated model will move the needle to 2TB but still retain a similar price-to-capacity ratio. The Reactor is based on an aging SM2246 controller but utilizes MLC NAND flash that doesn't require low-density parity check (LDPC) code to extent endurance.

The Triactor with the same SM2256 controller will move from 480GB to 960GB at the high end. This is a TLC model that costs less than the Reactor but leans on LDPC to increase endurance. For the most part, the Reactor and Triactor are simple capacity size expansions.

Two new products coming will take advantage of SMI's latest SM2258 controller and 3D flash. The Armor3d is the most exciting, with Micron 3D MLC, 565 MB/s sequential read performance, and a large overprovisioned 2TB capacity size. The overprovisioned space increases performance and should make up for many of the latency issues with first generation Micron 3D MLC.

The Triactor 3D with Micron 384Gbit 3D TLC will utilize the same SM2258 controller and a very large dose of programmed SLC to keep performance very close to the Armor3d. The advantage of this product is a lower price point, but at the expense of sustained write performance.

Mushkin has a well-balanced SSD product lineup going into 2017. We found a mix of new, newer, and newest technologies without a commensurate price increase.

Specifications And Features

Mushkin has quietly built several high-quality solid-state drives in its Texas manufacturing facility. Many of the Mushkin products sit quietly in the shadows and go unnoticed by the majority of users. Armed with a new state of the art manufacturing facility in Mexico, we expect higher output and a new brand push to get the word out about Mushkin Enhanced design and quality.

The Mushkin Triactor ships with an odd pairing. The drives utilize Silicon Motion, Inc.'s (SMI) low-cost SM2256 4-channel controller and SanDisk's 15nm TLC flash. The controller supports advanced low-density parity check (LDPC) error correction and control code, but it's an older version than the company uses on the newer SM2258. We rarely see SanDisk NAND used outside of company branded SSDs, but after the Western Digital acquisition more of the flash has spread to third-party SSD manufacturers.

Mushkin has built SSDs since the first early consumer SSDs came to market. As a memory manufacturer, Mushkin was alongside OCZ, Corsair, Kingston and Patriot with some of the earliest products available, but the company is one of the lower profile builders. Mushkin doesn't have a NAND flash fab or controller IP, so it has a small fraction of the market share compared to the fab-powered companies like Intel and Samsung. However, the company has a reputation for quality at a low price point, and we rarely hear anyone complain about Mushkin products.

Over the last year, the Mushkin Reactor with MLC flash has been on and off our Best SSDs list. The drive delivers a nice user experience at a price that is hard to overlook. The Triactor with TLC NAND looks to follow the same path. It utilizes quality components with an advanced cost-saving design and dedicated manufacturing. In some respects, the Triactor is a sleeper, but it's time to sound the alarm clock. 

Technical Specifications

The Mushkin Triactor ships in a number of configurations that range from 120GB to 500GB. Mushkin announced a 1TB product, but we've never seen it listed for sale. In the chart above, we listed the standard 7% overprovisioning capacities of 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB. Mushkin also offers a few oddball sizes (250GB and 500GB) with less overprovisioning but nearly identical performance.

As mentioned, the Triactor users an older 4-channel SMI SM2256 controller designed for TLC flash. This was Silicon Motion's first TLC-specific controller. The SM2258 succeeded the SM2256, but came with support for Flash Forward (Toshiba and SanDisk) and IMFT (Intel and Micron) 3D TLC NAND. By using older technology, Mushkin was able to reduce the price of the Triactor series without sacrificing performance.

This is also one of the rare third-party products to ship with SanDisk flash. Our drives arrived prior to the Western Digital acquisition, but since the takeover, we've heard about more companies gaining access to the premium planar flash. Mushkin chose 15nm TLC for this product. Many of Mushkin's products span multiple NAND lithography nodes, so it's possible the company purchased a large amount of flash at a discounted price and the Triactor will have a variable build of materials.

Performance tips the scale at 560 MB/s sequential read and up to 515 MB/s sequential write on the two capacities that we have in for testing. The 120GB model musters 380 MB/s in the sequential write category. The write performance quoted by Mushkin is only 'up to' due to the 3-bit per cell NAND flash. The random performance comes in at 85,000/87,000 read/write IOPS for the 480GB model. The smaller drives see a slight reduction, as specified in the chart.

The Triactor series does not support hardware encryption. In this price class we often overlook the feature and many users on this end of the pricing scale that have access to the feature do not use it.

Pricing

We only found a few Triactor SSDs for sale at Newegg and Amazon. The 480GB and 240GB drives we are testing sell for $112 and $70, respectively. The 250GB drive sells for $70 and the new 500GB tips the scales at $120.

Warranty And Endurance

The Triactor ships with a limited 3-year warranty that Mushkin capped with a Terabytes Written (TBW) clause. The TBW rating serves as a general indication of how much data you can write to the drive before the warranty expires. The 120GB drive features a 58TBW rating, which is one of the lowest we've seen on a retail SSD. The rating increases to 115TBW on the 240GB and 250GB SSDs and moves up the scale to 230TBW for the 480GB and 500GB Triactor SSDs.

Packaging

Mushkin used a low-cost blister pack to ship the Triactor, so it ships as a bare drive. This helps to keep costs low for end users.

A Closer Look

Other than the odd pairing of SM2256 and SanDisk 15nm TLC flash, the Triactor is a fairly basic SSD like many of the other products that compete in the low-cost market.

Mushkin's parent company, Avant Technology, always comes up with interesting ways to reduce manufacturing costs without reducing quality. Avant built the Triactor’s edge connector into the printed circuit board. Avant saves a few cents per drive by extending the edge out and embedding the SATA power and data connectors. This design also increases device integrity by removing the fragile plastic soldered component.

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Comparisons And Benchmarks

Comparison Products

We lined the Mushkin Triactor up against a handful of entry-level and mainstream TLC-based SSDs. The Samsung 850 EVO 500GB is on the upper end of the scale, and it's South Korean counterpart, the Sk Hynix SL308, also features a 500GB capacity point. The Crucial MX300 525GB sits just under the mainstream bracket with the Intel 540s 480GB and the 540s 480GB.

Sequential Read Performance

To read about our storage tests in-depth, please check out How We Test HDDs And SSDs. Four-corner testing is covered on page six of our How We Test guide.

The Triactor series is about value rather than performance. We always like to get an equal dose of both or at the least a solid mix of the two. The Triactor series is very attractive when it has a lower price than the other products on the chart. At queue depth 2, the Triactor performs well, but many of the more expensive drives outdo it. We have to pay close attention of the Triactor and OCZ Trion 150 because these two drives often compete for the lowest price on Newegg and Amazon.

Sequential Write Performance

The sequential write performance with the 3-bit per cell flash produces a wavy result due to the SLC buffer flushing data to the TLC portion of the NAND. The Triactor's performance is high for the first few minutes of a write workload, but then it drops down to native TLC write speeds.

Sustained Sequential Write Performance

We write 128K sequential data to the entire LBA range of the drive during these tests. The full-span test allows us to see how much data we can write to the SLC area, and also the performance after the buffer is full. The Triactor does not utilize a direct-to-die write scheme, which circumvents the SLC buffer when it is full, so the sustained sequential write performance is lower than many of the newer TLC-based products. The Triactor 480GB model delivers enough performance to write data at real-time speeds over a gigabit Ethernet connection. The Triactor 240GB will deliver around 85 MB/s, which is 20% less than a gigabit LAN connection.

Random Read Performance

Both Triactor SSDs outperform the Trion 150 and Intel 540s in low-QD small-block random reads. This is an important measurement for game launches and the overall user experience. Many Windows operations consist of random reads and writes, and most consumer workloads tend to read more than write.

Random Write Performance

The SLC buffer does a good job caching many of the small block size writes, but the Triactor uses only a small, fixed amount of space to catch the writes. Our testing overfills the buffer, so the results come out as a wavy line, which shows a mix of cached and native TLC random write performance.

80 Percent Mixed Sequential Workload

We describe our mixed workload testing in detail here, and describe our steady state tests here.

The SMI SM2256 controller was never known for excellent mixed workload performance, but we've found it to be suitable considering the price of the products it's used in. The 480GB Triactor provides better performance than the 240GB model because it uses twice as many NAND packages. The additional NAND packages allow the controller to use twice as many CE (Chip Enable) bonds per channel to boost parallelism, and thus performance.

80 Percent Mixed Random Workload

The high random performance slumps during the mixed workload tests (mid-way through the queue depth scale). At lower queue depths, the Triactor fares much better. The series outperforms many of the other products by a small margin. 

Sequential Steady-State

Most users will not force entry-level SSDs into steady state conditions, but it's much easier to drop into native TLC write speeds because of the small SLC buffer. Compared to SSDs with equal capacity (512GB and 480GB), the Triactor still puts up a good fight with an 80% sequential read workload.

Random Steady-State

Common sense tells us not to use the Triactor SSDs in RAID due to the small SLC buffer and low native-TLC write performance. The random 4K steady-state chart backs up the assumption. These drives don't deliver consistent random performance, nor a high average measurement, either. The Trion 150 is the only product that dives lower, but many of the products on the chart feature better performance consistency.

PCMark 8 Real-World Software Performance

For details on our real-world software performance testing, please click here.

The Mushkin Triactor 480GB compares well to the drives we've selected for the test pool. The drive doesn't fall to the bottom of the test results, but it doesn't show up at the top very often, either.

Application Storage Bandwidth

We combine the results and average them into a tidy throughput score to make it easier to compare performance in a wide range of real-world applications. The Triactor SSDs deliver higher performance than the OCZ Trion 150 480GB, Intel SSD 540s 480GB, and Sk Hynix SL308 500GB. It doesn't come as a surprise to see the Samsung 850 EVO 500GB at the top of the chart, but the Crucial MX300 525GB is the shock of the day. We expected the Triactor to outperform the MX300, but that didn't happen in the 512GB-class.

The Triactor 240GB did surprise us by outperforming some of the other products. The controller doesn't allocate a lot of NAND capacity for the SLC buffer, but it is efficient.

PCMark 8 Advanced Workload Performance

To learn how we test advanced workload performance, please click here.

We only focus on the recovery results with low-cost SSDs. The Samsung 850 EVO 500GB delivers the best performance, and that shouldn't surprise anyone at this point. The Mushkin Triactor 240GB is a distant second in throughput performance. The 480GB model suffers a different fate and trails all of the other drives in the chart until it has more recovery time. The test results reveal a lower-than-ideal controller clock speed, or at the very least, a slower memory management engine that needs more time to clean dirty cells.

Total Service Time

The Triactor 240GB delivers very good service times compared to many of the TLC-based alternatives on the market, and it even delivers under heavier workloads. The recovery performance could be a little higher, but it's at a severe disadvantage compared to the much larger drives.

The Triactor 480GB doesn't fare well in these tests when we analyze the service time results. We think the drive initiates the garbage collection and wear leveling schemes and doesn't stop until the entire task is complete. Other SSDs use this method as well, but without a better understanding of how the firmware works, we can't be completely confident that it is the root of the problem.

Disk Busy Time

The disk busy time results seem to back our theory of the forced background activity. Once triggered, the processes run and don't stop until the cells are clean. The processes reduce both read and write performance while the controller spends vital CPU clock cycles managing the background cleanup operations.

Notebook Battery Life

Both Triactor SSDs deliver average notebook battery life performance. There are not any surprises here. Users get better-than-HDD battery life, but some SSDs are better suited for notebook use.

Conclusion

Mushkin is one of the SSD companies that just plugs along making quality products without a lot of positive recognition. The company has never had a recall or emergency firmware release to fix a destructive data bug. The Mushkin SSDs usually sell for less than many competing products with a similar hardware configuration, but if you don't know to look for the Mushkin brand, you might overlook a diamond in the rough.

Mushkin occasionally releases a high-performance SSD, but most of its success stories come in the form of entry-level products that don't garner a lot of attention regardless of how high the quality is. The Triactor serves as an excellent example. It utilizes premium SanDisk flash that the manufacturer packaged, and it has sensible cost-reduction technologies that don't have a negative impact on the user experience.

Mushkin's choice of SanDisk flash is wise; it is the same as Toshiba's planar NAND and only takes a backseat to Samsung's planar NAND. The SanDisk 15nm TLC outperforms Micron 16nm TLC and Intel 20nm. The decision to use the older SM2256 controller instead of the newer SM2258 is another move to reduce costs. In our testing, the newer SM2258 doesn't bring much to the table with the planar NAND that Mushkin used with the Triactor. SMI primarily designed the SM2258 to add support for 3D NAND.

It would be interesting to find a similar combination of SM2258 and Toshiba 15nm MLC in a 480GB SSD to investigate if the newer controller reduces the recovery time. As long as you don't write a lot of data at one time, the high service time shouldn't be an issue. Idle time is the key to keeping the drive feeling fresh, along with not filling the Triactor to the brim with data.

The Triactor is about pricing, though. The Triactor 480GB SSD retails for just $112 online. The 240GB model is $70, so we feel users should spend the additional $40 to get the larger SSD. At these low price points, there isn't a reason to keep using a platter-based drive for anything other than cold storage. These entry-level SSDs offer a surprising amount of performance per dollar. If you need more than 480GB of space for games or other application data, you should consider adding one as a secondary volume. Then you can install your software on the non-boot drive to keep performance high on both the OS and secondary volume.

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Giving Gamers Some Flare

Zen, oh Zen, when will you get here? AMD enthusiasts are chomping at the bit for the latest and greatest from Advanced Micro Devices, and we are about to lose our minds. Rather than cry myself to sleep waiting for the boards to arrive, I decided to look at the many other boards that are relevant to my interests. In response to my previous article, many people asked, "Why would anyone drop money on such an old chipset?" Well, some people are just getting into the PC-building hobby; others are replacing broken hardware, and some just love AMD products and want to spend more of their money on other components.

After exiting the time machine from my trip to 2013 for my 990FX review, I saw that FedEx left a suspicious package on my doorstep. Lo and behold, Asus had sent me an AMD product to review: the Asus 970 Pro Gaming/Aura board. Queue the comments section: "This isn't even the top-of-the-line AMD chipset; why would you waste your time on this thing?" Being an enthusiast and always in search of knowledge and experience, I found this product offered a perfect opportunity to expand my knowledge of board manufacturers as well as introduce some more components and tests to my bench that the comment section desperately desired.

Specifications

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How To Choose A MotherboardMORE: All Motherboard Content

The Asus 970 Pro Gaming/Aura board was announced back in January and aims to bring value to the budget builder by including the SB950 south bridge in the 970 chipset. With this addition, most of the features that we see in our 990FX reviews are given new homes in this everyday platform. Just glancing over the specification sheet makes me curious how these changes help this platform stack up against some of the competition.

The packaging of this box reminded me of some higher-end boards, with a highly polished style along with a mixture of colors, gloss and minimalist branding adorning the edges. Upon opening the package, though, I found that the contents were sparse: a padded backplate, an installation CD, a user manual, two SATA cables and some zip ties for all of my cable-bundling needs. Sure, I'd like more SATA cables or maybe an Asus sticker, but no need to include that when all I'm looking for is some decent performance at a good price.

Walking my way around the board, the back panel includes one PS/2 port, eight USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.1 ports and one gigabit Ethernet port. SPDIF and six-channel audio output provide ample audio connectivity for a wide variety of speaker configurations. Along the back of the PCB are the Realtek ALC1150 audio chip and Nichicon capacitors, with a bead of illumination riding along the top of the shielding.

The south side of the board contains all of the usual suspects for case connections, with two USB2.0, one USB3.1 and one four-pin chassis fan headers. A nice surprise for this product is the inclusion of an M.2 SSD port for those builders who want to have NVMe-connected storage plugged into the mix.

I appreciated the inclusion of six angled SATA 3.0 connectors on the front edge of the board to help eliminate cables going across the motherboard, though I would have preferred them to be a few more millimeters off the edge. Another four-pin chassis fan header as well as a USB3.1 header hug the edge of the board along with the power-supply connector and memory slots.

The topside of the board sports three four-pin fan headers, which is a pleasant addition. The intention was to give users who utilize water-cooling reservoirs convenient access to the topside of the case, and also to make it possible for dual-fan heat-sink configurations to be PWM-controlled. 

As the product name suggests, this board gives off an aura of light when powered on. You can program this feature through the UEFI, and it can output several different color options. Along with the south bridge, the SupremeFX chip glows, and this board begs to be in a windowed case. If you don't need the lights, you can disable this option and place the board into a standard, boring case. Bah, humbug. 

BIOS

Digging around in the UEFI on this board was a pleasant experience and provided a mix of many of the other manufacturers' experiences in one package. When the UEFI first loads, I am presented with a dashboard-like home page that resembles the MSI tachometer UI. I am also two clicks away from the Advanced mode, which enables menu selection similar to that found on the ASRock and Gigabyte BIOS.

For the purposes of this article, I spent most of my time in Advanced mode, and again I was greeted with familiar features. The clock multiplier options once again caught me off guard, as they require manual input of the number or pressing the +/- keys when highlighting the field. When selecting voltage settings, Asus enables the user to access either absolute-setting mode or offset mode, which allows you to reach the appropriate voltage settings to obtain the desired overclock. I'll talk more about overclocking later, but I was very happy to have a lot of options in my attempt at ringing out performance. 

How We Test

I decided to ditch the DDR3-1600 modules from Mushkin due to the requests by the commenters on my previous articles, and searched the labs for an appropriate alternative. Fortunately, Thomas had finished looking at a 2800MHz kit from Klevv in his DDR3 vs. DDR4 article, and he had access to the 2666MHz variant. Two 8GB kits now fully populate my test system.

The main downside to this addition is that these kits also emit an aura of their own. In order to implement the diodes, they have a taller heat spreader than standard DIMMs, and those force me to reverse the orientation of my CPU cooler. This isn't too big of a deal, but it did prove to be an airflow challenge when overclocking this specimen.  

To keep these Vishera cores cool, a Sunbeamtech cooler is utilized to provide maximum air-cooling capacity across all of my AMD test platforms. Zalman's ZM-STG1 paste is used as the thermal compound for this test platform. 

It might not be the latest generation, but the Radeon HD 7970 has enough performance to play the latest games at decent settings. It's heavy and it draws a lot of power, which makes it a good candidate for testing the power subsystem of my test samples.

Even with these power-hungry components, this 500W, 80 Plus Gold-certified power supply has no problem keeping the system going with constant power while running the standard test suite and individual stress tests.  However, these components will draw a little more than 500W of power when running both Prime95 and FurMark.  Note to self: When conducting a 100 percent stress test, get more power!

The Mushkin Chronos SSD is still running strong in this AMD test system, so I will continue to use that disc. We are still finalizing our Windows 10 test image across our reviewing teams, so I am still using my same hard disk image from my previous review. However, I did implement two game benchmarks to please the crowd and provide some reference points to compare against previous writers' suites.

Test System Configuration

Benchmark Settings

One final note about my configuration: I ran all of these benchmarks in DDR3-2133MHz mode. I did this intentionally, to show how much of a performance increase we will see in the synthetics, while demonstrating that this doesn't play out as well in the applications.

Comparison Motherboards

Test Results And Conclusion

After installing all of my components, I performed a mini stress test to confirm that my processor and configuration are situated properly. I like to have my case closed so that I can simulate a true system-power-draw scenario. When I launched FurMark and let it run for about 5 minutes, I noticed the power draw was fluctuating significantly. 

Glancing at my screen, I noticed that the utilization of the GPU was throttling and the screen would turn sluggish during the run. HWMonitor was, in fact, showing instances where the GPU was hitting a high-temp scenario, and rather than just ramp up fans, the firmware would decrease the utilization in an attempt to reduce power. Being a curious builder, I decided to remove the side of the case to see if the case's airflow was the issue.  Sure enough, after another 5 minutes the GPU was throttling less and the power-draw measurements were becoming much more consistent. I suspect that the airflow in my case was severely reduced when I rotated the heat sink to accommodate for the taller memory heat spreaders. By having the heat sink fan right next to the exhaust fan probably created an airflow disturbance, which decreased the effectiveness of the exhaust fan. #themoreyouknow

Right off the bat, PCMark's bundled benchmark results are consistent across chipsets regardless of the memory configuration. I also see similar results with Sandra Arithmetic and Multimedia and a decent increase in the Cryptography benchmark. Memory bandwidth is higher, as I expected, with about a 28 percent increase. 

From the applications perspective, I am not surprised at the overall performance between the 990FX boards and the Asus 970 Pro Gaming/Aura. A couple seconds here, a couple seconds there—each board trades shots with the others. A minor trend I see is that the MSI 990FXA and the Asus 970 Pro Gaming show improved CPU performance in OpenCL and multithreaded encoding tasks. The only major delta I observed is After Effects, which according to the documentation requires 2GB RAM per core. With 16GB, we finally hit the recommended spec with this platform, so keep that in mind if it is a primary application being run by the user. 

Game Synthetics And Macros

The gaming benchmarks show a welcome delta between the boards. From the Asus 970 Pro Gaming perspective, 3DMark11 shows nearly a 2 percentage point win for combined scores, and default Fire Strike outperforms its competitors by nearly 7 percentage points. However, Fire Strike Extreme puts all of these systems in their place, knocking any deltas to less than 1 percentage point.

The Lone Wanderer has made his way to my test bench, and after over 100 hours of gameplay, I know exactly where I want to collect some performance data. To test Fallout 4, I picked a strip of road outside Hangman's Alley on a sunny day. I recorded a 50-second run along the road, including an encounter with some Super Mutants. Ambient nature, shadows, and a couple of laser blasts and explosions hit a good mix of graphical stress that represents a fairly decent worst-case scenario. With settings at the Ultra preset (including Ultra god rays), I hit a minimum frame rate of 22.4 and average right at 29.6. Do note, this is not the same benchmark that Igor ran for his Fallout 4 piece and my results are quite a bit lower than his. His benchmark is more of an expected use-case scenario with this card, whereas mine is a more pessimistic test.

Battlefield 4 is starting to show its age, but it still is a decent representation of graphical performance regardless of hardware.  The Asus 970 Pro Gaming/Aura ran the Tashgar intro sequence at an average frame rate of 52 and only dipped down to 41 a few times on the drive into the city.  If enough people ask, I can retest both of the 990FX boards with these two games as well.

Overclocking, Power And Performance

The Asus 970 board definitely shows some improvements in the power department compared with the 990FX competition. At idle, the system is consuming 13 percent less power than the average, 9 percent below average for Prime95 and runs right in line with the MSI board for the GPU torture test. 

Remember those really tall heat sinks on the memory? They forced me to rotate the heat sink and put the fan in a position to pull air across the heat sink, which is not optimal in my case. The data corroborates this statement with an extra 15 degrees of processor temperature.

With power, performance and temperature data taken into consideration, it is clear that the Asus 970 Pro Gaming/Aura packs a punch, and does so with a smaller power footprint. The performance values might be slightly skewed by the Sandra memory bandwidth result, but power is power. 

Full disclosure: this board was overclocked differently than the other samples, so I will not compare my results directly to them. However, I am pleased with what I was able to achieve. At the beginning, I tried matching the previous systems' results and was unable to hit 4300MHz with default settings and previously recorded voltages. The system would boot and run but would still generate hardware errors while running Prime95. Digging deeper into the BIOS, I switched to the Medium load line setting, upped the voltage to 1.375V, and was able to run Prime95 for a bit before hitting a Worker 6 rounding error. In order to hit 4400 MHz, I had to engage the High load line setting and increase the voltage to 1.3875V to hit a 100 percent stable overclock. Even using the higher load line setting, the thermals of the processor were below 75C and power draw was right at 300W, which I feel is safe enough for prolonged use. As always, take caution when overclocking—I am not responsible for damaged hardware!

Seeing the delta in DDR3-1600 and DDR3-2133 benchmark scores, I didn't push the voltages of these DIMMs  for extra performance. I attempted to increase the frequency using stock settings to 2400MHz, but the system would not boot. I was able to decrease the timings to 9-11-11-31 while at 2133MHz, which is nearly close to stock DDR3-1600 timings. Overall, I was pleased with the breadth of timing options and the quality of these Klevv kits.

Value And Conclusion

As I stated earlier, this 970 sample was not tested to the same standards as the 990FX samples I previously reviewed, so extracting a fair value comparison would not be fair for the previous boards. However, as the performance chart shows, this 970 board edges out its bigger brothers when using the DDR3-2133 settings. Even taking that into consideration, having a lower price than the 990FXs gives the advantage to the Asus 970 Pro Gaming/Aura from a value standpoint. I would make an educated guess that the 990FX boards would perform similarly with the higher speed RAM, but efficiency and other features still go to the Asus.

Do I like the 970 chipset? Sure, it is a good, value-oriented option for builders who still want options. With SLI and CrossFire available in an 8x/8x configuration, this platform has some longevity in it as long as you are committed to the AM3+ socket. This board includes a great number of features and higher-end options at this cheaper price point, making it an excellent rival to the 990FX brethren.

MORE: Best MotherboardsMORE: 
How To Choose A Motherboard: A Guide For Beginners
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Jacob Terkelsen is an Associate Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware, covering Motherboards.

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Specifications, Pricing, Warranty And Accessories

The Mushkin Reactor 1TB is one of the best-value SATA 6-Gbps SSDs on the market today. The drive sells for less than $280 and has held that mark for several quarters. The drive maintains its position with MLC NAND flash while being surrounded by similarly priced SSDs armed with inferior 3-bit per cell (TLC) NAND. With superior flash, the Reactor 1TB sustains high write speeds, making it ideal for gamers looking for large flash capacity at a low price.

Initially, Mushkin released Reactor in only one capacity: 1TB. Later, a 512GB model with similar performance specifications came to market. Not long after that, the company released a 256GB Reactor but with lower performance due to limited parallel flash utilization.

Today, we're testing the smallest Reactor, to see how it compares to other low-cost SSDs. The Reactor 256GB is one of just a few remaining low-cost MLC products still available, as others, such as the Crucial BX200, shift to TLC.

Technical Specifications

MORE: Best SSDs For The Money 
MORE: Latest Storage News 
MORE: Storage in the Forums

The Reactor 256GB SSD's only drawback is its lower sequential write speed. This model still reads at 560MB/s but delivers up to 325MB/s sequential write performance. The two larger models achieve up to 460MB/s. The Reactor 256GB also has slightly lower random write performance, but the small difference shouldn't be noticeable under normal desktop workloads.

At the heart of all Reactor Series SSDs is a Silicon Motion SM2246EN four-channel processor. This model has been on the market for well over a year now, but in the budget-SSD market, older is better. The Reactor is a throwback model originally designed for mainstream applications. Mushkin uses in-house NAND packaging and innovative manufacturing techniques to lower the price into the value SSD range.

The Reactor uses 16nm Micron flash that was purchased in wafers. Mushkin handles the bin process as well as packaging. This also allows Mushkin to reduce manufacturing costs. The non-SSD-grade flash can go into thumb drives and other similar products, leaving the high-quality flash for SSDs.

Pricing, Warranty And Accessories

We're starting to see 256GB SSDs selling in the low $60 range. Right now the Reactor 256GB sells for $84.99. At that price it's not as attractive as the 512GB and 1TB Reactor models that lead in their capacity classes. Mushkin may address the 256GB price later with a reduction to bring it in line with other SSDs selling today.

The Reactor has a three-year warranty but does not include any accessories or a software package.

A Closer Look

There isn't anything special about the retail package for this series. To shave costs as much as possible, Mushkin used a blister pack that only includes a show card for effect and the drive.

From the outside, the Reactor 256GB is just as unremarkable as the retail blister pack. It does use a 7mm Z-height design, so it fits in Ultrabooks and notebooks that require the slimmer design.

Upon first inspection, the Reactor looks like any other SSD. They are all pretty much the same from this angle, with little variation in layout and only component differences. The connector is special on the Reactor, though. Parent company Avant Technology designer Paul Goodwin is responsible for this change. The PCB is the SATA power and data connector. This saves on BOM (build of materials) costs and provides better signal integrity than a separate connector that needs to be soldered to the board.

Mushkin chose Silicon Motion's SM2246EN four-channel controller as the base of the Reactor. Silicon Motion allows companies to provide input on the firmware, so each company has something a bit different. Many of the existing products with this controller have been discontinued and replaced with new SMI SM2256 controllers and TLC NAND flash. That's what makes the Reactor 256GB special now. Mushkin doesn't plan to discontinue this product line anytime soon.

We are still on the fence about third-party NAND flash packaging, as it doesn't allow us to verify what flash is used. Mushkin tells us that it uses genuine Micron flash from wafers.

Four-Corner Performance Testing

Comparison Products

Nearly all of the drives on this chart utilize TLC NAND flash with write enhancement technology to deliver high burst speeds that are not sustainable for more than a few seconds. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO is the current midmarket performance leader. Its quad-plane TLC flash breaks the mold and delivers longer sustained write speeds than other TLC SSDs shipping with flash from Toshiba and Micron. The Plextor M6V is a newer model that uses the same playbook as the Reactor. The M6V uses the SMI SM2246EN controller like the Reactor but pairs it with Toshiba's 15-nm MLC flash.

To read about our storage tests in-depth, please check out How We Test HDDs And SSDs. Four-corner testing is covered on page six of our How We Test guide.

Sequential Read

The differences between the drives however, have no affect on the read perimeter tests, as observed in the set of charts above. Sequential random performance is high across the board for all of the drives. The Reactor 256GB isn't as fast as most of the other models at low queue depths in this measurement, but it does operate at higher speeds with larger block sizes.

Sequential Write

The sequential write performance is at the lower end of the scale as well compared to most of the other low-cost SSDs. The Adata SP550 and the OCZ Trion 100 have slow buffer flushes to TLC NAND, so the results are inconsistent, much like their write performance.

We get a good look at the difference between Micron's 16-nm MLC and Toshiba's new 15-nm MLC flash with the SM2246EN controller. The Toshiba flash used in the Plextor M6V 256GB is roughly 40MB/s faster. The M6V does cost more than the Reactor, though. Both drives are still in the midrange of sequential write performance, with the SanDisk Ultra II and Samsung 850 EVO earning high marks.

Random Read

The Mushkin Reactor 256GB delivers nearly 8,000 random read IOPS at queue depth 1 with 4KB of data. We like to see 10,000 IOPS in this test from high performance drives, but there isn't an established standard for low-cost SSDs. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO does manage to achieve that high mark at a low price, though. That's part of the reason it's the standard by which all other low and mid-priced SSDs are measured.

Random Write

The Plextor M6V 256GB and the Reactor 256GB have nearly the same 4KB random write curve as the drives ramp up from queue depth 1 to queue depth 8. The Reactor is faster than the Ultra II in this test past queue depth 2 and much faster than the Trion 100 and the SP550. The Trion 100 performs a little better with compressible data but not well enough to make up the distance between it and the Reactor.

Mixed Workload And Steady State

80 Percent Sequential Mixed Workload

Our mixed workload testing is described in detail here, and our steady state tests are described here.

Mixed-workload tests give us a clearer picture of how a drive will perform in your computer. A computer system rarely just reads or just writes data, unless used as a secondary volume to store mass data. Under this view, the Reactor shows fare performance, but it still falls well short of the Samsung 850 EVO 250GB.

80 Percent Random Mixed Workload

The same 80 percent mix of read-to-data writes with random 4KB data shows the same picture. The Reactor 256GB performance is right in the middle, where we expect to find it based on price data.

Sequential Steady State

Under normal conditions, users will never achieve full steady state with a client-grade SSD. Client workloads are not stressful enough to drive this level of performance. As the drive fills up, performance drops off because the drive is struggling to find clean cells that will keep write performance high.

We also get to see an exaggerated bathtub curve here of mixed sequential performance and how some drives handle mixed data better than others.

Random Write Steady State

The 4KB random-write test in steady state shows us two important measurements that have very little to do with the actual output. The first thing we look for is performance consistency—a nice steady line of IOPS with a very narrow gap between high and low points. The SM2246EN controller was clearly not designed for enterprise workloads, so the peaks and valleys are far apart. We also look at the low IOPS, because putting a pair of these drives in RAID 0 to equal the performance of another drive is a step in the wrong direction. We don't recommend that you use the Reactor 256GB in RAID 0 for performance benefits.

Real-World Software Performance

PCMark 8 Real-World Software Performance

For details on our real-world software performance testing, please click here.

In this section, we see how the previous tests present in real-world workloads. Much like in the other tests, the Mushkin Reactor 256GB falls in the middle to the bottom of each application test chart.

Looking at the same tests, but combined and as throughput, the Reactor doesn't fair as well. We're surprised to see it delivering lower application performance than the SP550, a drive using TLC NAND flash. None of the tests involve installing large games, an area in which the Reactor would separate itself from the TLC models.

There is also a large gap between the Reactor and the Plextor M6V 256GB with the same controller. Toshiba NAND flash has long outshone Micron flash, and that has carried over to the smallest lithography nodes from each company.

PCMark 8 Advanced Workload Performance

To learn how we test advanced workload performance, please click here.

The advanced set of tests use the same software loads as in the previous section and output the results in throughput. The test starts by preconditioning the drive to achieve steady state. Then the application workload starts and runs without interruption until the recovery phase. Going into the recovery phase, the drive being tested gets 5 minutes of idle time to perform background flash-management activities, like garbage collection. 

The recovery phase is what we're looking at for this price range of products, and it represents the level of performance you will see after an extended period of use. Again, the Reactor stays in the middle of the chart. The ADATA SP550 with the new Silicon Motion SM2256 controller designed for TLC flash performs in the same space as the Samsung 850 EVO.

Total Access Time

Things go from poor but acceptable to just poor when we look at the total access time. This test takes latency into account and gives us greater insight into the user experience. Under very heavy loads, the 256GB Reactor stumbles, but the test looks much better under normal client workloads. 

Notebook Battery Life

Latency builds on top of latency when one request has to wait on another to complete. The demons from the previous set of tests carry over to the notebook battery life test. The two larger Reactor models both performed at the top of the list against drives with similar capacity. The 512GB model delivered just over 687 minutes of on-battery time. The extra latency means the drive has to work longer before dropping down to idle, power-saving states. This hurts battery life and is the reason regular four-corner power measurements do not mean less power consumption over time.

Conclusion

After looking at the test results, you may discard the Reactor and consider it a poor product. The 256GB model doesn't have the same value as the two larger-capacity models, failing to offer mainstream performance at an entry-level price. But we do see some potential here.

The low queue depth random performance hurts the Reactor 256GB's value as an operating system drive, but the high sequential performance, especially compared to most TLC-based drives, gives this model life as secondary storage to install games on. Mushkin billed the Reactor as a model designed for gamers, and that user group will benefit the most from MLC over TLC with SLC cache. When you install games that are now up to 50+ GB in size, you want the high sustained-sequential-write speed and not a tiny buffer that quickly falls to less than HDD levels.

Further saving the Reactor is the fact that most new low-cost SSDs will ship with TLC. The longer Mushkin keeps this model around, the better it will look for the target audience. Micron and Toshiba are not planning to build quad-plane TLC flash, so anything using TLC from either company will find lower than HDD sequential-write performance. Samsung, on the other hand, has a real gem with the 850 EVO. It's the drive all others must undercut on price in order to compete today.

As it sits right now, both the Reactor 256GB and the 850 EVO 250GB sit right at $90. That's a bad place for the Reactor 256GB and again shows how Samsung is turning the screws on other SSD manufacturers. For the Reactor 256GB to compete with entry-level drives, like Mushkin does with the larger-capacity versions, the price needs to first get into entry-level territory.

MORE: Best SSDs For The Money 
MORE: Latest Storage News 
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Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. 

Follow Tom's Hardware on Twitter, Facebook  and Google+.

Mushkin is an old-school gaming-focused company that has a long history and many fans of its products. The company's memory products were once considered a staple for overclockers, but in recent years the solid-state products have come to the surface and become main products in the stable.

Mushkin plans to release several new products in 2016 and will bring many to market with new 3D flash memory from Micron, Intel, Toshiba and SK Hynix. One of the first products we'll see is a larger capacity Reactor. The Reactor 1 TB currently sits on our Best SSDs chart for its large capacity size and very low price. Reactor will expand in 2016 to 2 TB with new 3D flash memory, but we may also see a special 4 TB model at some point.

The 4 TB Reactor will pair two Silicon Motion, Inc. SM2246EN controllers behind a JMicron RAID controller. The company told us it will still try to target the 25-cents-per-gigabyte mark like the current Reactor products, but time will tell. Flash is a volatile market with many ups and downs.

We don't have any timeline or performance details but suspect the new dual-controller drive will suffer from low random performance due to the low-cost JMicron JMS562 eSATA to dual SATA bridge used to RAID the two SMI controllers. Still, with 4 TB on tap, we would love to fill a 10GbE connected NAS with these drives and give it a go.

Mushkin's Phison S10-controlled drive, Striker, will also see its capacity double in 2016. After overprovisioning that increases performance, the Striker SSD will scale up to 1920 GB. This gives Mushkin a high performance SATA SSD in the 2 TB capacity class product range. This too will rely on 3D flash from several vendors.

Mushkin plans to release two 3-bit per cell SSDs in early 2016. The first shown above, Triactor (get it?) will use an SMI SM2256 controller and TLC flash. This model will ship worldwide and should sell for even less than the Reactor that is already one of the lowest cost SSDs sold today.

The Mushkin ECO3 will be a Newegg Exclusive but will use nearly the same configuration as the Triactor. When companies list products exclusively with Newegg, the reseller will chip in with some extra promotion. Having the ECO3 highlighted in email blasts and giving preferred placement on the site will help it become a popular product for those looking to save some money with TLC flash products. 

It seems that every company has a prototype E7 drive around to show off. The Phison E7 is gearing up for a big launch with products coming from several companies including Mushkin. This will be an almost SF-2281-like launch, but that is great news for consumers looking for a great SSD at an even better price. Mushkin has shown the E7 a number of times, so there really isn't anything new from the company about the drive. Phison did state that the E7 should ship in retail around March of this year. This will bring NVMe technology to a wider audience because the drives should cost less than Intel's SSD 750 and Samsung's 950 Pro, the two shipping NVMe protocol products currently shipping in volume for client workloads.

Mushkin has joined the ranks of SSD manufacturers offering M.2 SSDs. Mushkin designed the Atlas Vital for Ultrabooks, notebooks and small form factor SSDs, which is the standard fare for this type of drive. The 6 Gbps SATA Atlas Vital comes in the 2280 form factor, denoting that it measures 22 x 80 mm in length and width, and sports the oh-so-familiar SandForce SF-2000 series controller.

The trusty SandForce 2000-series controllers have been around for a long time, but they still manage to deliver enough performance for the majority of workloads. SF-2000 series controllers do not require DRAM, which is important in the M.2 space because it reduces the number of components on the PCB, thus leaving room for other components - such as more NAND. The lack of a DRAM buffer also helps insulate the SSD from data loss during unexpected power loss, and reduces cost and design complexity.

The Atlas Vital comes in capacities of 120, 240, 250, 480 and 500 GB and provides up to 86,000 4K random read IOPS. There is no indication of the random write performance, but we do know the SSD weighs in with 550/535 MBps of sequential read/write speed.

Mushkin is one of the few SSD manufacturers that actually packages its own NAND. The company receives NAND in wafers and cuts them down to size, and then packages the die for its SSDs. Many third-party SSD vendors are forced to buy pre-packaged NAND, which is costly and exposes them to supply and pricing turbulence. Mushkin indicated the Atlas employs MLC NAND, but it did not specify what type or from what vendor.

Previous generations of the Mushkin Atlas series featured mSATA designs, but quick industry adoption of the M.2 standard makes the inclusion of M.2 models inevitable for all SSD vendors. The Atlas Vital SSDs feature the 6 Gbps SATA interface, and for those in search of more performance, there isn't going to be a long wait. Mushkin has its Hyperion SSD waiting in the wings and already demoed prototypes at CES 2015. The Hyperion is built with a Phison E7-based PCIe 3.0 x4 controller, which pushes out up to 2.8/1.2 GBps sequential read/write speeds and up to 300,000 random IOPS.

The Atlas Vital is shipping now, and we have included the current pricing in the chart above. We caution readers that SSD pricing is volatile, and we encourage you to check prices over several days to find the best deal. The SSDs only come with a three-year warranty, which is common in the M.2 market.

Paul Alcorn is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

The usurpation of DDR3 as the most common type of system memory by DDR4 isn't far off, but DDR3 still has life in it. Mushkin's new enthusiast ECO2 DDR3 RAM is designed for overclocking, which should help extend the DDR3's performance even more.

The ECO2 memory features fairly standard clock speeds and latency. The RAM is clocked at 1600 MHz, with either CL9 or CL11 timings. The voltage is lower than the standard DDR3 kit, however, at 1.35 V.

Although the clock speed isn't exceptional right off, by raising the voltage up to the standard 1.5 V, the RAM should have more overclocking headroom than the typical DDR3 RAM kit. Stamped aluminum heatsinks are utilized to cool the RAM and should also allow for increased overclocking ability.

Mushkin stated that each RAM module is hand-tested in motherboards before being shipped out, and the company offers a lifetime warranty. Though it is almost certain that occasionally a bad memory module will slip through (there isn't a company in the industry who can claim 100 percent non-DOA RAM) these tests should help reduce the number of modules that are shipped DOA. In addition, if one is found to be bad, the memory should be replaced without charge.

"We are excited to offer our newest ECO2 product, the ECO2 memory line for budget-conscious enthusiasts who want to maximize their gaming and user experience," said Brian Flood, Director of Product Development at Mushkin. "The success of our ECO2 SSDs proved to us that users are not just looking for another run-of-the-mill SSD or memory module, which is why we developed something more efficient and cost-effective, and the new ECO2 memory line of modules where born."

The company is working hard to differentiate itself in a highly competitive market, pushing quality and reliability to help its products stand out, hoping that its ECO2 RAM kit can do just that.

Follow Michael Justin Allen Sexton @LordLao74. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

Introduction

Mushkin originally released its Reactor at a single capacity point: 1TB. That model is currently our Budget Buy leader. It's an affordable, well-balanced SSD for anyone looking for acceptable performance at a low price.

Like the 1TB Reactor, Mushkin manages to position its newer 512GB model as the lowest-priced SSD in its capacity class on Newegg and Amazon. Nearly every aspect of the Reactor was designed to cut costs. The company even introduced an edge connector able to increase rigidity while shaving 10 to 12 cents from the bill of materials.

The drive uses Silicon Motion's proven SM2246EN controller paired with Micron's low-cost L95B 16nm flash. Mushkin was one of the first companies to utilize the SM2246EN, and we've since seen SanDisk, Crucial and a number of other vendors integrate it into their own budget-oriented products. The processor uses only four channels to the flash, so it's a low-cost part. But Silicon Motion squeezes a lot of performance out of the design. At the same time, it doesn't use much power.

Silicon Motion provides firmware as part of its solution, so companies working with the SM2246EN don't incur a lot of R&D resource drain. After the initial tooling and validation, they can take products to market quickly.

Mushkin now packages flash purchased in wafer form. This allows the company to take in several grades of NAND and use the best dies for solid-state drives. The lower-grade stuff goes into thumb drives and other flash-based products. But the Reactor uses Micron L95B 16nm NAND, which we've found to be faster than Toshiba's 15nm MLC and TLC flash. Micron has been selling L95B to third-party companies for around a year now. Yields are up, so it's plentiful and cheap.

Two other cost-cutting measures are used to make the Reactor more affordable. First, it ships in a blister pack without any accessories. We don't mind this since SSDs are robust and difficult to damage. Second is that previously-mentioned edge connector, designed by parent company Avant Technology.

Technical Specifications

MORE: Best SSDs For The Money
MORE: Latest Storage News
MORE: Storage in the Forums

After introducing its 1TB Reactor, Mushkin decided to release two additional capacities: 256 and 512GB. Today we're testing the 512GB model.

All three are rated for the same generic performance specifications, though we suspect that the 256GB version is a little slower due to less interleaving. The 512GB model uses the same number of flash packages as the 1TB drive, with half as many dies per package. Still, performance should be nearly identical.

Silicon Motion controllers deliver very high sequential read performance. In fact, in many of our tests over the last year, they delivered the best sequential reads of any platform we compared. Sequential writes land about 80 MB/s lower than premium SSDs like SanDisk's Extreme Pro and Samsung's 850 Pro. With modern SSDs, you pay more for write speed and performance consistency.

Pricing, Warranty And Accessories

At the time of writing, Mushkin's 512GB Reactor was sold out at both Amazon and Newegg. We reached out to Mushkin for comment and were told:

"The Reactor 512GB will be back in stock at Newegg on Tuesday [June 2nd, 2015] for $159.99. The 256GB model is still in stock at $87.99 and the 1TB model is in stock as well at $339.99."

After a quick check, we confirmed that the Reactor 512GB we're testing today is the lowest-priced 512GB-class SSD at Newegg, though as of June 15th, it's selling for $10 more than Mushkin claimed. The 1TB model holds the same designation for its capacity class, and the 256GB model is priced competitively.

Mushkin's Reactor ships with a three-year warranty, but doesn't include an accessory package. We can't knock it for this, given the attractive price point. This is a value-oriented product that satisfies the industry norm for low-cost SSDs.

A Closer Look

Mushkin ships its Reactor drives in a blister pack to keep costs down. This shifts the responsibility for packaging to the company's distributors. Fortunately, SSDs are very robust and not particularly susceptible to shipping damage.

Mushkin uses a 7mm z-height chassis for the Reactor, so it fits in notebooks that require the thinner form factor. 

The mounting points are right where they need to be, making installation on a drive sled or desktop adapter bracket effortless. 

The SATA power and data connectors are a little different, as you can see. This is an interface that we expect to see on more products in the future, though.

Mushkin fully populates the Silicon Motion SM2246EN four-channel controller. The company also uses Samsung DRAM for the Reactor's page buffer.

The Silicon Motion SM2246EN has a thermal pad between it and the chassis, turning the metal enclosure into a sink for dissipating the controller's waste heat.

There are 16 packages of Micron L95B NAND; the controller is clearly utilized to its fullest on this drive.

Here's a closer shot of the Reactor's edge connector. We spoke with Paul Goodwin, Chief Technical Officer at Avant Technology, about the new connector. Paul says he patented the interface, which uses the PCB for connectivity to power and data pins. This increases signal integrity and reduces build costs. Companies are able to license the design from Avant. We believe it saves between 10 to 12 cents per SSD. That may not sound like much, but in high volume, the savings add up quickly.

Data Type Comparison

Historically, only SandForce controllers were affected by the data you threw at them (they slowed when you hit them with incompressible information). However, new products hitting the market are subject to variance as well. We can easily identify performance differences using a range of entropy settings under Anvil's Storage Utility. The software lets us switch from 100% compressible to 100% incompressible to 46% (applications-grade) entropy.

The Reactor performs the same, regardless of the data you work with. This means you don't need to worry about using this drive under heavy multimedia workloads.

Sequential Read

To read about our storage tests in-depth, please check out How We Test HDDs And SSDs. Four-corner testing is covered on page six.

As you can see, the SM2246EN controller is capable of delivering very high sequential read results, even at low queue depths. We single out QD2 for comparing performance between products.

At a queue depth of two, Mushkin's Reactor falls a little behind some of the other drives. At the same time, it's faster than several mainstream and performance-oriented SSDs. Expect to enjoy quick game level load times and speedy transfers from your Reactor SSD to other drives in your PC.

Sequential Write

Sequential write performance is noticeably lower than many of the other comparison drives.

Crucial's 500GB BX100 uses the same SM2246EN controller and Micron L95B NAND. Performance between the two is nearly identical, even though the BX100 has some of its flash reserved (over-provisioned) for background activity.

Random Read

The BX100's over-provisioning helps it perform a little better than the 512GB Reactor. The difference is small, but the edge does go to Crucial.

Both products would benefit from advanced caching algorithms like SanDisk's nCache (found in the Ultra II SSD). Micron recently announced tools available to third parties that work with L95B FortisFlash, but the Reactor shipped before those tools were available. pSLC cache mainly increases random write speed, but also has a slight positive effect on random read performance. 

Random Write

The QD1 random write performance from Mushkin's Reactor 512GB is down compared to many other drives on our chart. This is an area where FortisFlash would really help. Even SanDisk's Ultra II with three-bit-per-cell flash is faster at low queue depths, even though TLC has higher write latency. 

By QD2, the Reactor regains composure and outperforms the low-cost competition, going so far as to run with SanDisk's Extreme Pro 480GB. The recovery at QD2 appears to be part of an optimization effort to improve the user experience on SMI-controlled products.

Most users never push high queue depths. SSDs are so fast that it's nearly impossible to stack commands. Even if you're multitasking with several programs running, it's difficult to even hit QD8, since most applications hit the drive for a moment to get or write the data they need.

80% Sequential Read Mixed Workload

Our mixed workload testing is described in detail here, and our steady state tests are described here.

A handful of outstanding commands and some light preconditioning with 80% reads is one of the most relevant ways to measure both sequential and random performance. On this chart, we see that most of the drives fall into the same performance range with only a few outliers at QD4. Pay the closest attention to QD2 and QD4, even though we take our measurements out to enterprise-class levels.

At QD2, only the Samsung 850 Pro stands out with higher performance than the other SSDs in our comparison group. Several drives prove to be slower, but Mushkin's Reactor lands in the group of more average products.

80% Random Read Mixed Workload

The mixed-data random write test tells nearly the same story, though the group of drives in the middle is separated by a little more variation. Mushkin's 512GB Reactor is in the lower half, along with Crucial's BX100. The 850 Pro again demonstrates the best performance at QD2 and QD4, and when it comes to low-cost storage, Samsung's 850 EVO trails just behind the 850 Pro. Samsung's caching scheme, TurboWrite, really helps the TLC-based 850 EVO in this workload.

Sequential Steady State

Steady state measurements remove the advantage of pSLC caching. Intel's SandForce-controlled SSD 530 does well in this test, even with the 50% entropy setting we use.

The 512GB Reactor trails nearly every other drive on this chart. At the same time, it wasn't designed to perform well under such an extreme load.

Random Write Steady State

We can learn a lot from the random write steady state test, even if none of us will ever see this condition on a desktop. Here, we're looking for performance consistency. The Reactor delivers a steady stream of 4KB random writes, but spikes when the DRAM cache is able to accept some of the writes. The only part we don't like about this measurement is the low level of 4KB random write performance when the cache doesn't catch the data.

PCMark 8 Real-World Software Performance

For details on our real-world software performance testing, please click here.

In our real-world tests, Mushkin's Reactor consistently falls to the bottom of the chart. It finishes many of these tasks within one second of some of the other drives, and normally that'd turn us off. But the Reactor's price helps us overlook its performance deficit.

Total Storage Bandwidth

In this chart, we average throughput from the previous tests. The benchmark runs each workload three times over roughly one hour, measuring performance in many of the applications we all use on a daily basis.

As we saw in the individual results, Mushkin's 512GB Reactor lands at the bottom of the list. It's a lot faster than a hard drive, so there's something to be said for that. The 256GB model isn't even priced too far from mechanical storage at around $88.

PCMark 8 Advanced Workload Performance

To learn how we test advanced workload performance, please click here.

Under our various workloads, the Reactor trails the other SSDs we tested.

Latency Test

The service time results give us more cause for concern. Under heavy loads, Mushkin's 512GB Reactor isn't the drive you want crunching data. Its latency is just too high.

Under light workloads, the Reactor recovers somewhat, but falls in with a pack of competing models. On the bright side, at least it costs less.

Notebook Battery Life

For more information on how we test notebook battery life, click here.

One environment where the 512GB Reactor fares well is in your notebook, running on battery power. It allows our Lenovo T440 to stay mobile longer than any other drive in our chart. This test is a corner case, sure. But when you're watching Windows' power meter tick down, it suddenly matters a lot more and the Reactor becomes the drive to own.

We're happy to report that Mushkin doesn't sacrifice performance under battery power either. All SSDs slow down somewhat, but some drives suffer more than others.

Conclusion

In a perfect world, everyone would have the highest-performing SSD available to drop into their notebook and enthusiast-class desktop. Sadly, most of us are on more limited budgets. SSDs remain premium performance components. Even though price per gigabyte is way down compared to a few years ago, cost still isn't comparable to mechanical storage. Entry-level SSDs like Mushkin's 512GB Reactor deliver around 10 times the performance of a hard drive. But sometimes the extra expense just isn't in the cards.

Mushkin's Reactor really does a good job of pushing solid-state storage down to more affordable price points. Given modest performance and low cost, this drive is one of the best values we've seen. Just remember that it's not going to be as fast as some of the more enthusiast-oriented SSDs we review.

SSDs are also more reliable than disk drives. This is a selling point that resonates with many users. The reliability increase more than doubles in a notebook environment. Desktop users still benefit from lower latency and higher throughput. The Reactor doesn't ship with a desktop adapter bracket, so owners of older PCs need to consider mounting options. Some low-cost SSDs priced just above the Reactor do come bundled with adapters. Those products usually employ older controller technology that doesn't deliver the same random and incompressible speed, though.

Mushkin's Reactor sits right on top of the happy median line. Anything that costs less at this capacity point is going to be a mechanical hard drive, and everything above forces you to spend more without a corresponding increase in space.

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Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.

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Seeing Red

Do you have an X99-based platform? Do you only need 16GB? Those easily-answered questions lead to a much harder one: which memory kit to you buy? An increasing assortment of reasonably-priced DDR4 makes it more difficult to pick the right one. Companies that were able to get into the market early and make a bundle of cash on overpriced parts have already done so, giving us a larger group of higher-volume products competing with substantially similar specs.

In other words, the DDR4 market is becoming a race for value.

Redline 994206F memory modules by Mushkin Enhanced are aimed at the middle of the DDR4 market, where performance enthusiasts trend when they want to put more cash towards the processor or graphics. How does a brand stand out in such a price-sensitive pocket?

Red heat spreaders help, as does a DDR4-2800 CAS 15 rating. Then again, you’re paying an extra $30 for that higher rating, compared to Mushkin’s own DDR4-2666 CAS 15. We’re probably going to need to settle this by overclocking!

In fact, you’re not going to get very far without overclocking, since DDR4-2133 CAS 15 to 19 are the only configuration options that don’t require tuning your CPU. Every motherboard we’ve seen configures a DDR4-2800 XMP profile by first selecting the processor's 1.25x BCLK strap (the internal ratio of the CPU core to the lower parts of the CPU, such as it PCIe 3.0 controller). Choosing this strap automatically overclocks the CPU by 25%. And, realizing that a 25% CPU overclock probably won’t work at stock CPU core voltage, motherboard vendors program their firmware to set a lower CPU multiplier. For the Core i7-5930K, it’s usually 30x.

The numbers get messier from there, as Intel rates the Core i7-5930K at 3.5-3.7GHz, depending on the type of load applied. But 30x125=3750. That fixed frequency interferes with certain low-power states and maintains a 50 to 250MHz advantage over the stock configuration. Enthusiasts might think this is great, but it’s not exactly fair to compare different memory kits at different CPU frequencies.

Automatic CPU overclocking doesn’t stop there, as 125x11x2 is 2750, not 2800. Our motherboard attempts to reach the memory’s full 2800 MT/s data rate by increasing the core BCLK from 125 to 127.3MHz. We now have a 3.82GHz CPU core, which is great for performance but, again, doesn’t allow a direct memory performance comparison.

Fortunately, our Asus X99-Pro sample supports data rates far above the 2666 MT/s available on most motherboards. Its 14x 100MHz memory ratio isn’t super-stable, but it is stable enough to operate this memory at its rated frequency. Crashes at 14x typically apply to memory that’s already nearing its limit, and it looks like Mushkin’s Redline 994206F has room to grow.

Speaking of growth, our collection of 16GB quad-channel memory has grown to the point that we may soon find ourselves forced to break these out by rated data rate. That’s a shame really, since we’ve seen so many lower-rated kits reach such high overclocks that they really should be allowed to run with the big boys.

Results And Analysis

Retained hardware and software from our initial DDR4 round-up allows us to compare every DDR4 kit reviewed, without retesting. Almost as important is that I can show the link, rather than repost a bunch of redundant setup tables. We’ll jump straight to the point!

Intel’s higher memory multipliers are less stable than the more familiar validated settings, and the easiest way to get a more aggressive data rate with a lower memory multiplier is to use an elevated base clock. The CPU's 1.25x strap allows the parts that can’t be overclocked very far to run at 100MHz while the CPU core and memory controller operate at 125MHz. Memory multipliers that would normally correspond to DDR4-2400 and DDR4-2666 at 100MHz BCLK become DDR4-3000 and DDR4-3333 at 125MHz.

No memory we’ve reviewed thus far has been stable at a 3333 MT/s data rate, and our CPU becomes unstable at BCLK frequencies beyond 132MHz (corresponding to a 3168 MT/s data rate). Filling the hole between 3168 and 3333 requires underclocking the 125MHz BCLK, which would be silly if not for the fact that it exposes the true limits of each memory kit. In this case, Mushkin’s DDR4-2800 overclocks only one test setting lower than G.Skill’s highly-praised DDR4-3000.

Redline 994206F also overclocks one test setting higher than Corsair’s high-priced Dominator Platinum, though the price of those premium parts includes fancier heat spreaders and its Airflow Pro activity and temperature monitoring interface.