14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives can be curious things, small and narrow, thin enough to hide behind two of your fingers if you hold them at the right angle. However, most SSDs have a much more conventional look, so it falls to the insides to set them apart from the rest.
Mushkin isn't exactly a rarely encountered brand, so that's not going to help sells (or hurt the chances for that matter) of the new Reactor SSDs.
Likewise, Silicon Motion isn't unheard of. Still, most solid state drives we've written about have a SandForce, Marvell, Indilinx or JMicron controller, among others.
There is a good part to this though: as Silicon Motion is a less known producer, but with performance still quite good in spite of that, Mushkin's new Reactor SSDs might turn out to be cheaper than similarly-endowed storage devices.
That said, we can't be perfectly sure. The company has published the Reactor SSD product page, but didn't give out the price.
Also, the capacity of 1 TB is bound to demand a significant payment all on its own, so it's only other 1 TB / 960 GB models you'll be able to compare against.
The specs of the Mushkin Reactor SSD
Besides the capacity, the most important parameters are the read and write speeds. The Silicon Motion SM2246EN controller allows for 560 MB/s reads and 460 MB/s writes.
On that note, the random 4K performance is of 74,000 input/output operations per second, both for reading and for writing.
Mushkin developed it for large-scale data capacity applications, but also for normal consumers who want full SSD performance, not just SSD caching through Intel Smart Response or something similar (when an SSD and HDD are combined by the system).
"Solid-state drive technology is growing in leaps and bounds. Mushkin has been a leader in unleashing performance-maximizing products for a wide array of consumers, and we are pleased to be able to - once again - offer an SSD solution that can quench the growing need for large-scale data capacity at incredible speeds," said Nicolas Villalobos, Director of Global Marketing at Mushkin.
Availability
An ETA wasn't specified in the press release, but we assume sales will begin soon, if retailers haven't already listed the Mushkin Reactor as up for order. Check with them for the price, since (as we did mention previously) Mushkin itself didn't really reveal it in its announcement.
