Mushkin Enhanced Chronos MKNSSDCR480GB 2.5" 480GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Pros: Other price, none

Cons: First unit DOA. Second unit worked fine for a day then died. Will RMA for store credit. Won't waste my time trying a third.

Pros: Fast and cheap $ per GB

Cons: I have had a few errors with this drive although I can't be sure at this point. I have had a few cases where the bios didn't see the drive or the drive just stopped responding. This is happening so infrequently that it is impossible to troubleshoot down to the motherboard, power supply or drive. It's happening like once or twice a month and I have easily corrected the problem by cycling power or unplugging the non boot drives. I hate intermittent problems. It would be so much easier if it just died. At least with Mushkins 3 year warranty, I'll just wait until it does die. If it's even the problem.

Other Thoughts: Seeing I can't narrow the problem down to the drive for sure, I'm not going to give it a bad rating yet for now.

Pros: None at this point. Hopefully my RMA will provide a better unit.

Cons: I am using this drive in my Lenovo W530 Ultrabay slot (as a secondary drive for VMs). After receiving the drive, I noticed that although it was recognized, the formatting process was taking several minutes. Other drives in the ultrabay slot were only taking a few seconds to format. The drive eventually formatted and I was able to use it.

Soon after that, the drive would disappear from Windows (off and on).

In addition, I tested drive speeds and they were fairly slow compared to my other SSD I'm using for my boot device (250MB/s vs 400MB/s). Not sure if it was just this unit or of this drive is just slow.

I updated the drive firmware from Mushin's site as well as my W530 BIOS.

The SSD firmware installed successfully, but after updating my laptop BIOS, the BIOS would no longer recognize the device.

I've requested an RMA and will update my review when the new one arrives.

Pros: A great drive with the price tag and size to lure people over to the wonderful world of SSD's. If you're like me and want an SSD with decent capacity and without having to sacrifice your entire wallet or speed, then this is the drive for you. It wont break any IOP records, but for consumers that's an overrated statistic. Access times aren't the best, yet they are ahead of SSD's 3-4 years ago and leagues ahead of your HDD.

Cons: Asynchronous NAND. While it may be great for first time SSD converts, it has a downfall that comes with the price. Slightly less performance and all the inconsistencies that Asynchronous NAND can bring. Don't get me wrong, it's fantastic, but there are draw backs.

Other Thoughts: I would consider this a perfect drive for those who aren't ready to sacrifice the size of their HDD's and don't want to bother with RAID0. You can only move up the latter with the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 480GB. To think this drive is considered near the bottom of the barrel of top performers just amazes me. If you're willing to spend an extra $30 then go for the Deluxe. No Asynchronous NAND and much more consistent performance.

Pros: Almost half a TB for a reasonable price. I had previously owned a Crucial 128 GB SATA 3 SSD and that worked fine, however this drive seems faster to me in both boot times and program installation. The crucial also disapeared on me a couple of times and I had to do a power cycle to get it back( this may have been a mobo issue.) I have bought Mushkin ram for over 10 years and it has always worked at advertised speeds out of the box and never failed. This is a fast, silent, good value harddrive. I dont need benchmarks to tell me that. Everytime I stray from Mushkin I get disapointed. Highly recommended.

Cons: none

Pros: Low cost per GB. SATA 3 interface.

Cons: The drive performs well transferring 512k blocks but badly when transferring 4k blocks. My 2-year old Intel SSD performs well on both counts.

All this goes to say is this SSD performs very poorly when transferring small files.

Other Thoughts: You get what you pay for. While this is a low-end SSD from a performance point of view, it's still head and shoulders better than conventional HDs and the price is hard to beat.

Pros: Good SSD, no issue so far.

Cons: Async Nand

Other Thoughts: Why do you rate down my review from 12/21/2012?? Tell me, why??

I took the time to tell my impressions, I also wrote As-SSD results, and you still rate it down? Is it because I titled it "1TB of SSD" and it's a 480GB SSD?

Frustrating...

Pros: The best performance out the box on lag time for me.
540MB/s Read / 430MB/s Write ~ Installed W7HP in 2 minutes.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: A hint to those writing bad reviews. I've bought numerous SSDs of all brands. Opinions are a..h-les everybody's got one.

Pros: This SSD is blazing fast. I have it installed in an HP Pavilion dv7 series laptop, and coming from the standard 5,400 RPM HDD, this is a HUGE improvement. The boot time has been reduced from a little over a minute to a little under 20 seconds. Also, for the capacity and speed, this drive is incredibly cheap compared to other SSD's in the same category.

Cons: This was a bit of a bore to install in the dv7. No matter what software i invested in to clone the hard drive, it still would not boot. Eventually, I just did a clean restore and started fresh. Since I assume many people that invest in a drive like this are doing so on a clean install, I am not taking an egg off for my troubles. Also, I had to buy an extra $30 SATA cable, but again, not worth taking an egg off.

Other Thoughts: In conclusion, I would buy the drive again, because the speed increase is absolutely worth any difficulties during installation. If you find your computer slowing down, you may want to invest in this drive. It will make your system 100% more responsive. But remember, when installing an SSD, make sure you turn off the Windows Page File, as well as System Restore to minimize writes to the drive. Also, never defragment an SSD, as it can significantly reduce its lifespan. Make sure your BIOS is set to AHCI mode, as opposed to IDE. Enjoy the newfound speed!

Pros: PRICE!!!
Mushkin?
SandForce way to improve performance with compressible data and slow NAND.

Cons: Asynchronous NAND

Other Thoughts: When I saw the price (190$), I could not resist! This price is unbelievable!! Many 256GB are priced higher than this one. I took 2 of them, put them in RAID0 with a modded BIOS to allow TRIM on Z68 (only SATA 2 left). I really don't care if they are a little bit slower than other top end SSD, they are used for data storage. Fast access storage is really useful. I will certainly update the review if one of them fail (at which point I will lose 1 TB of data). But don't worry, I have everything backuped every week on a HDD (now plugged to my router).

My computer is silent, bye bye spinning and clicking HDD!

AS-SSD results, filled 70% (don't forget, RAID0 on SATA 2):
Seq: 479 - 403
4K: 20.2 - 16.7
4K 64Thrd: 138.5 - 121.4
Acc. time: 0.303 - 0.223
Total score = 495