The up to 960 GB Striker SSDs also have hardware encryption

Jan 9, 2015 09:21 GMT  ·  By

When they can't reach 1 TB for whatever reason, 960 GB seems to be becoming a pretty popular upper threshold for solid state drive capacity, with Kingston, OCZ, Corsair, and now Mushkin releasing drives featuring that much storage space.

Mushkin has formally released the Striker 2.5-inch series of SSDs. Not surprising that a product announcement would come from its direction, what with the Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada (CES 2015).

The new product line is composed of 256 GB, 512 GB and 960 GB models, all powered by the same PS3110-S10 controller.

Due to the chip, the quality of the NAND Flash chips, and the fact that hardware encryption barely affects data speed anymore, the newcomers are both capacious and fast.

The specifications of the Mushkin Striker SSDs

The PS3110-S10 controller drives the storage units, as we said. It is a quad-core processor with 8 channels. Because of it, the drive can read data at up to 565 MB/s and write it at 550 MB/s.

The random 4K performance is, meanwhile, of up to 90,000 IOPS, where IOPS means input/output operations per second.

Sequential speeds will vary somewhat with capacity, but they should still go above 500 MB/s even in real world tests.

Meanwhile, data is kept safely secured thanks to 256-bit AES encryption support, while its health is maintained by 120 bit per 2KB ECC (Error Correction Code).

All this in a 2.5-inch, 7 mm-thick form factor, as we've come to expect from consumer solid state drives at this point. It is the optimal package for laptops after all.

End-to-End data path protection, SmartECC, SmartRefresh, SmartFlush, GuaranteedFlush is implemented in all cases, along with TRIM/SMART support (OS/driver support required) and user-upgradeable firmware.

Finally, DEVSLP support allows the drive to enter a very low power consumption mode, to place even less pressure on the battery when the system is idle or asleep.

Availability and pricing

Mushkin plans to start selling the Striker SSDs by the end of the first quarter of Q1, which could mean anything from tomorrow to the end of March. The prices are, sadly, not known, but they should end up comparable to those of every other current-generation SSD of similar capacity out there.

"Mushkin is committed to giving our customers the best performing and most reliable SSDs and our new STRIKER family of drives delivers," said Brian Flood, Director of Product Management at Mushkin. "With an ever-increasing demand for greater performance, the new STRIKER drives provides the ultimate combination of speed and reliability for today's demanding applications."

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