14 DAY TRIAL // Most solid state drives made for customers on a budget, so to speak, usually don't reach very high transfer speeds, at least in SSD terms. However, Mushkin has just launched a drive that does.
That's what the company claims anyway. Without some sort of price list we can't know for sure if the new Chronos G2 really are all they're cracked up to be.
It might even be that the 480 GB/s model costs as much as any other high-end SSD would, leaving it to the 60 GB drive and its peers to cover the entry-level market segment.
It would definitely fit the trend of progressive performance if nothing else. In case you don't know, SSDs get faster the greater their capacity is, and vice versa.
Still, Mushkin says in its press release that the new Chronos G2 SSD line “provides customers the option to enter the SSD world with a limited budget” so we'll hope for the best for now.
The Mushkin Chronos G2 SSDs
There are four of them, with capacities of 60 GB, 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB, respectively and random write performance of up to 90K IOPS (input/output operations per second).
According to the respective product pages of the drives, all of them reach above 500 MB/s sequential performance, both for reading and for writing.
In fact, there's a certain paradox in play here. The highest-capacity unit, the 480 GB one, read and writes data at 540 MB/s and 465 MB/s, respectively, but the others are faster.
The 60 GB drive has read and write speeds of 550 MB/s and 515 MB/s, the 120 GB drive runs at 555 / 525 MB/s, and the 240 GB one attains 555 / 535 MB/s. Thank SandForce SF-2000 series controllers for this.
In all cases, the MTBF is of 1.5 million hours and the connection interface is, of course, SATA III. Without the 6.0 Gbps bandwidth permitted by it, those nifty read and write rates would have been impossible. Halved at best.
Availability
Mushkin didn't elaborate on it, neither on the official product pages nor in the press release, and we can only hope that it really will deliver on its “for budget conscious users” promise considering that the drives are all made in the USA, instead of fabs/OEMs from Asia (where labor is cheaper).
The company did mention one thing though: all units have 3-year warranties. Maybe because the 1500 G shock tolerance will let them survive longer than other SSDs. Most SSDs have only 2 years of warranty.
