Mushkin Reactor 1TB SSD Review
by Kristian Vättö on February 9, 2015 11:32 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Mushkin
- Silicon Motion
- SM2246EN
- Reactor
- Micron 16nm
AnandTech Storage Bench 2011
Back in 2011 (which seems like so long ago now!), we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 – Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on peak IO performance and basic garbage collection routines. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. Our thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives. The full description of the Heavy test can be found here, while the Light workload details are here.
The strong performance continues in our 2011 Storage Benches. Only Samsung has found the secret recipe to providing noticeable performance gains, whereas the majority of other drives are very close and that applies to the Reactor as well.
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prime2515103 - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Is it just me or are SSD review getting really boring? Every time I see a new one I think, "Maybe something new and exciting this time..." but it never happens. I think SATA needs to be put to rest.piroroadkill - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Yeah, SATA3 is making everything boring as hell now.ddriver - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
That's a limiting factor only on sequential access. There is still huge potential to be harnessed for random access, but nobody seems to be in a hurry to boost IOPS.Kristian Vättö - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
SATA, or more accurately AHCI, is the limit when it comes to IOPS/latency.cm2187 - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
I can only talk for myself but personally I could use more size than speed. There is very little of what I do that would give me a different experience at twice the speed of the current SSD specs. But give me a 4TB SSD as cheap as 6TB HDD are today and now I can replace all these spinning disks.0ldman79 - Wednesday, March 4, 2015 - link
Agreed.I might keep a couple of mechanical drives, but I'd love for the price to be closer to the mechanical drives for the capacity.
Too bad that's not the way our market works in much of anything these days.
Solandri - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
PCIe actually doesn't make that big a difference. Your perception of how fast/slow things are is in terms of seconds you have to wait. These benchmarks are in MB/s which is the inverse of your perception. If you plot these benchmarks correctly in sec/MB, all these SSDs are pretty much the same, and the PCIe SSDs only give you a small fraction of the speedup you got going from SATA2 to SATA3. e.g. Imagine you need to read 1000 MB.10 sec = 100 MB/s HDD
4 sec = 250 MB/s SATA2 SSD (6 sec improvement)
2 sec = 500 MB/s SATA 3 SSD (2 sec improvement)
1.25 sec = 800 MB/s PCIe SSD (0.75 sec improvement)
nathanddrews - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
This is very true, but doesn't make me want it less. :-DWhat kills me is the lack of "affordable" 2TB+ drives. How is that we go from $400 for 1TB in a 2.5" drive to $1,500-$4,000 for 2TB? I expected that all these die shrinks and 3D technologies would have made 2TB+ SSDs possible in the ~$700-$900 space, but there's nothing to buy! FFS, what gives?
DanNeely - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
It's a giant game of chicken, and no one wants to be the first to kick over the enterprisy pricing gravy train. We saw the same thing a few years ago when 512TB drives started at $350 but the cheapest 1TB ones were well north of $1k.At the risk of sounding overly cynical; I suspect the first vendor to blink will be whoever is first to either get the higher nand density or the 32 chip controller needed to make a 4TB flash drive in a 2.5" form factor.
Cogman - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Mostly it comes down to demand. Nobody is really demanding 2TB SSD drives. As a result, there is little competition and little incentive to make a $800 drive (even though it is totally feasible).