Mushkin Builds Budget-Oriented Chronos G2 SSD

By Niels Broekhuijsen
published

Mushkin's Latest SSD brings another value offering to the market.

In the world of SSDs, there are a handful of things that can make a given drive stand out, including speed, capacity and price. Mushkin aims to check that last box by offering an affordable solution for everyday users with its Chronos G2 SSD.

The Chronos G2 SSDs are built with a SandForce SF-2000 series controller and MLC NAND flash. The drives themselves are quite similar to the older Mushkin Chronos drives that have already been on the market for a while, but the G2s come with a couple of minor changes to improve performance, power consumption and endurance.

Sequential read speeds should hit 555 MB/s, with write speeds ranging up to 535 MB/s. Mushkin has rated the drives with an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of 1,500,000 hours. Idle power consumption sits at 0.7 W, while an active drive will consume around 3 W. Naturally, the drives come with TRIM support and work over a SATA3 (6 Gb/s) interface.

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Header Cell - Column 0 Read SpeedWrite SpeedRandom 4K Write
Chronos G2 60 GBUp to 550 MB/sUp to 515 MB/s90,000 IOPS
Chronos G2 120 GBUp to 555 MB/sUp to 525 MB/s86,000 IOPS
Chronos G2 240 GBUp to 555 MB/sUp to 535 MB/s85,000 IOPS
Chronos G2 480 GBUp to 540 MB/sUp to 460 MB/s54,000 IOPS

All things considered, there's not all that much new stuff here. Mushkin has left pricing to the retailers, and NewEgg has the drives priced at $59.99 for the 60 GB model, $79.99 for a 120 GB variant, $124.95 for a 240 GB drive and $219.99 for the highest-capacity 480 GB unit, placing them in line with competing budget-oriented SSDs.

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Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • TechyInAZ
    Wow, that's cheap cheap. I can still remember when I got my Corsair Force GT 120GB SSD over a year ago, all the SSD's were at least $120 for the 120GB model and $500 for the 480GB model. Now were spoiled. :D
    Reply
  • Daniel Ladishew
    Wow, that's cheap cheap. I can still remember when I got my Corsair Force GT 120GB SSD over a year ago, all the SSD's were at least $120 for the 120GB model and $500 for the 480GB model. Now were spoiled. :D

    The smallest drive is the same $/GB as the ones you are talking about. It shows that the price of the memory isn't driving up the price of the drive anymore. I'm mostly looking forward to the day when all SSD drives are prices under 50 cents/GB and we only need mechanical drives for mass storage.
    Reply
  • bentonsl_2010
    Wow, that's cheap cheap. I can still remember when I got my Corsair Force GT 120GB SSD over a year ago, all the SSD's were at least $120 for the 120GB model and $500 for the 480GB model. Now were spoiled. :D

    I have a hard time seeing how this is a upgraded/newer version. The old model had a mean time between failures of 2,000,000 hours. The have a faster read speed. additionally they are 7mm in height and have 5k more IOPS @ 4k RR's oh I forgot its cheaper too.
    Reply
  • Drejeck
    STOP MAKING SANDFORCE SSDS!!!
    Reply
  • mapesdhs
    Niels, how come the 4K write performance is better with the lower capacity models?
    That seems a bit odd.


    Drejeck, stop spreading the FUD. All the old fw woes were fixed long ago. I have
    more than 30 SF SSDs (mostly OCZ, Vertex2E/3/MXI), all running fine. The only
    units I wouldn't touch are the very low end like the Octane, and likewise I wouldn't
    recommend the Sandisk Pulse, any model of that kind, just asking for trouble.

    And btw, given the rationale people were using before, should people now stop
    buying Samsung SSDs because of the old-data fw issue? Of course not; it'll
    be fixed soon like all such bugs are. What annoyed me is the way people
    kept banging on about OCZ even though the later models didn't use SF at all.
    The Vertex4 and Vector SSDs are really good.

    Ian.

    Reply
  • hannibal
    Yep! The important thing is that those bugs gets fixed... Even Intel have had its part in hardware bugs. So why anybody buys Intel hardware???
    Because, even there are bug in there, they are normally fixed in reasonable time.
    Reply
  • mapesdhs
    Absolutely! Intel had the 8MB bricked issue way back, but they sorted it. I think when OCZ had their
    problems, their mistake was releasing products that really had too many issues (the race to beat others
    to the market), and poor customer service re getting replacements. The affected model(s) went to market
    too early, so of course if one gets burned by that sort of thing then no wonder people are prone to say
    forever more, "don't buy from them!", but companies change, policies change, and in the case of SSDs,
    the bugs get fixed. I reckon being bought out by Toshiba and forced to refocus is perhaps the best
    thing that could have happened to OCZ.

    The irony is, the Vertex2E/3 generation of SF is now so old, there really aren't any issues at all, very reliable.
    I have a stack of them I use for my benchmarking rigs.

    Anyway, the later models using Indilinx and other controllers (Vertex4, Vector) are completely different and
    worked much better from the outset. Far fewer issues reported. Indeed, it's interesting to note even today
    how high up in review charts the Vector keeps showing. OCZ's problem now though is they're generally too
    expensive. I had hoped that their buyout by Toshiba would enable better pricing, but atm the 840 EVO is
    only fractionally more than an ARC 100 but usefully faster (so I'd get the EVO), while the Vertex 460 is more
    expensive (both need to be decently less than an EVO to be attractive IMO, especially the ARC which really
    should be more in the same price range as the MX100).

    Personally I'd happily still buy a Vector 150, but its price is too close to the 850 Pro, so I'd opt for the latter.

    Ian.

    Reply
  • james_44
    14335372 said:
    STOP MAKING SANDFORCE SSDS!!!

    I recently came accross this article.Thought might be of some help to you. http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/4928/corsair_force_gt_2012_240gb_ssd_review/index.html
    Reply
  • mapesdhs
    Update: I managed to obtain two new 850 Pro 256GB units for a good price (103 UKP each). Testing with AS-SSD,
    the 850 Pro isn't that much quicker than a Vector 256GB (total score of 1160 vs. 1058), the largest differences
    being for 4K read and 4K-threaded read/write. They were about the same for seq. read, the Vector slightly
    better for seq. write, and basically identical for 4K write. Overall the 850 Pro is about 10% faster. The Vertex4
    is a bit below the Vector (total AS-SSD score of 1024 for the 128GB model). The Vector 150 is a bit slower than
    the Vector, and the 840 Pro is similarly a bit slower than the 850 Pro, the largest difference being for 4K-thrd read.

    If anyone's interested in the raw numbers, I can upload a zip of all the BMP screenshots (AS-SSD, CDM, HDtachRW
    and Atto for about 20 different SSD models/capacities).

    Ian.

    Reply