14 DAY TRIAL // Back in May, Mushkin Enhanced came out and unleashed a series of Solid State Drives that would come to be known as one of the fastest on the market. Known as the Callisto line, said storage devices made the best of the very popular SandForce controller and also featured decent capacities. There is always room for improvement, however, and Mushkin has now confirmed this by officially announcing a new iteration of the same drive collection.
The company has put together the Callisto Deluxe Series of solid state drives, which have vastly similar specifications, except for a certain boost to random write performance. Between that and the identical price points, these newcomers are bound to completely replace their predecessors. Most of the performance numbers are the same, but what stands out is the high number of Input/Output Operations that they can accomplish per second. In short, the devices have random writes of up to 50,000 IOPS.
The Callisto Deluxe employs the SandForce SF-1200 NAND Flash memory controller that, on the SATA 3.0Gbps interface, enables maximum read and write speeds of 285MB/s and 275MB/s, respectively. Additionally, the units have a very high reliability rating, as is evident from their MTBF of 2 million hours. Furthermore, the TRIM command is supported, which means that the data rates will not degrade over time.
"The Callisto deluxe SSD Series is Mushkin Enhanced's finest hour in a long tradition of high-performance, high-reliability flash storage products. Gamers, enthusiasts and even casual users will appreciate the considerable performance advantage this iteration of SSDs offers," said Brian Flood, Mushkin Enhanced director of product development.
The new and improved Callisto Deluxe solid state drives from Mushkin Enhanced, priced at $218, $370 and $666, have capacities of 60GB, 120GB and 240GB, respectively, and are accompanied by a three-year warranty.