Mushkin Enhanced ECO3 2.5" 240GB SATA III TLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MKNSSDE3240GB

Pros: Cheap American company Solid metal drive case Write speeds are great for short-bursts Read speeds are excellent

Cons: SLC cache is about 2.4 GB for the 120GB drive (measured by HD Tune). After this is exhausted, speeds vary between about 53 MB/s and 75 MB/s (averaging closer to 75, with dips to 53) SATA and power connector use the actual drive PCB for the connector (No soldered on connector). I’d imagine this was done to cut costs, and seems functional, but may cause issues with frequent connect/disconnect cycles. No published flash memory endurance numbers. Faulty temperature sensor? My drive reported a temp of 11C for the duration of all tests. Ambient was around 21C. There is no dashboard or other software available from Mushkin for drive monitoring/maintenance.

Overall Review: This drive will be used in a HTPC that is used primarily for Streaming video, Steam In-Home Streaming, and some light gaming. It is replacing an over 10 year old HDD. I believe that the TLC based shortcomings won’t be an issue with this usage scenario. Although the solid metal case seems rugged, it does weigh significantly more than a plastic cased SSD. Normally replacing an HDD with an SSD in a mobile device results in a weight reduction, this SSD may weigh about the same. Using this in a desktop negates the issue. Formatted capacity is 111 GB (120,031,539,200 bytes) Firmware version is 01126A as reported by CrystalDiskInfo Tests were performed on an AMD 970 chipset (SB950 southbridge). A newer chipset could have marginally better numbers. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- CrystalDiskMark 5.0.3 x64 Test : 1024 MiB [F: 0.1% (0.1/111.8 GiB)] (x1) [Interval=5 sec] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 553.452 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 451.892 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 277.322 MB/s [ 67705.6 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 241.179 MB/s [ 58881.6 IOPS] Sequential Read (T= 1) : 471.884 MB/s Sequential Write (T= 1) : 408.721 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 24.943 MB/s [ 6089.6 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 51.998 MB/s [ 12694.8 IOPS] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- AS SSD 1.8.5636.37293 Test: 1GB ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Sequential Read: 466.22 MB/s Sequential Write: 415.14 MB/s 4K Read: 25.55 MB/s 4K Write: 70.85 MB/s 4K-64Thrd Read: 258.67 MB/s 4K-64Thrd Write: 105.82 MB/s Acc.time Read: 0.051 ms Acc.time Write: 0.082 ms 16MB Read: 29.14 iops 16MB Write: 25.95 iops 4K Read: 7310 iops 4K Write: 18137 iops 4k-64Thrd Read: 66219 iops 4k-64Thrd Write: 27090 iops 512B Read: 19689 iops 512B Write: 12214 iops Score Read: 334 Score Write: 218 Combined: 731 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- HD Tune Pro 5.60 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Full Disk Read Minimum: 363.8 MB/s Maximum: 421.8 MB/s Average: 370.5 MB/s Access time: 0.046 ms Burst rate: 152.2 MB/s CPU usage: 5.4% Short Stroked Write (3 GB) Minimum: 52.9 MB/s Maximum: 377.2 MB/s Average: 259.0 MB/s Access time: 0.077 ms Burst rate: 153.5 MB/s CPU usage: 6.3%

Pros: I was a bit on the fence with this drive before purchasing. It was 109.99$ when I purchased it and I had never really bought cheap SSD's. I come from already owning a few Samsung 850 Pro drives. I wanted to try something new and this was really cheap to had to my array of drives. I was suprised on performance. My tests showed a max read of 410 and a write of 386. Which in my opinon, I really didn't expect much. Now my samsungs are obviously in the 560 read 490 write area alone without raid. But for this drive to be a so inexpensive I was very pleased. Continuing on building a workstation PC,HTPC & Home Server. I might consider picking up a few more of these in the near future.

Cons: None at this time.

Pros: -Inexpensive (good price/value ratio) -Efficient upgrade for older systems (without buying a new one)

Cons: -TLC (if you believe the whole TLC vs MLC NAND thing) -3 year warranty (I actually would like seeing at least 4 year as an industry standard - it would be more comforting and assuring to know that the manufacture stands behind it) -Definitely not the fastest, but priced accordingly (if you catch it on sale)

Overall Review: I have ECO2 series (512GB) and this one. While I do not see a difference in real life usage between the two drives, 512 GB ECO2 drive has MLC NAND while ECO3 has TLC NAND. My coputer has SATA II connection so it is not able to fully utilize read/write speeds of this drive, but my Windows 7 loads within 15s after BIOS screen (used to be 1-1.5 minutes easily). One thing that still bothers me (just like ECO2 series), Mushkin touts it as the only manufacture who designs and assembles their products in USA (that is their marketing gimmick even on their website), but this drive has "Hecho en Mexico" sticker right on the from of the drive. I do NOT care where the drive is made as long as it is reliable, but such marketing ploys are irritating me and does not make a good impression towards Mushkin. I hope Mushkin addresses it.

Pros: I have ordered over 300 of these in the last 2 years and have had only one of them give me any issues. They perform better than the Samsung Evos that we have tried, but not quite as well as the Samsung Pro drives. They just work, and they work well. They work in laptops, desktops, RAID systems, and external enclosures with no issues.

Cons: None

Overall Review: I highly recommend these drives, unless I need more than 480GB, I only buy the eco3 drives.

Pros: Replaced a Mushkin ECO2 120GB drive with this for extra primary drive storage, and the benchmark improvements were great. I'm able to reach 564 MB/sec read and 530 MB/sec write speeds in ATTO using a queue depth of 10 and the AS-SSD benchmark outperforms the ECO2 series by quite a lot. Considering the 240GB is only $64.99 at the time of this review, I would say that it's probably one of the best budget SSDs currently on the market and right on par with the Zotac 240GB Premium SSD which has received numerous accolades from websites like TweakTown and such.

Cons: No cons to speak of...the package is simplistic and doesn't come with any software, but you don't really need any with this drive. I would use AOMEI Backupper Standard (freeware) to clone your drive over to the new SSD if you prefer not to reinstall your OS, but other than that I have nothing bad to say about the drive.

Pros: Very fast Not too costly Decent size storage Super easy to set up

Cons: It wasn't free! Normally I'd knock off an egg for this but I will let this one slide.

Pros: Fast!

Cons: None

Overall Review: I received a defective drive. I can not say enough good thing about Muskin and how they handled the replacement of the defective drive. Super professional super easy instructions and all in all AWESOME customer service. I have deleted my unfavourable post and now I would recommend this product and company to everyone! The replacement drive has been flawless!

Pros: Cloned an SATA II laptop drive to it and it booted up. Then put it in a customers desktop to replace an almost full 120GB SSD. Got the WOW again from the customer. The read/write numbers are both above 480MB/sec. Win 7 64bit boots up in 12 seconds.

Cons: None

Overall Review: It is important that the SSD clone AND boot up in a SATA II computer as some have this hardware (the SanDisk SSD PLUS 120GB will not boot up after cloning in a SATA II environment but does work in a SATA III pc or as initial Win 7 installation).