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Mushkin’s U.S.A. designed ECO3 transforms your ultra-portable or desktop workstation to run all your essential programs at the same time without sacrificing performance do to the slow speed of a standard hard drive..
What if? Two simple words. But when combined, the possibilities are endless. At Mushkin, we've stopped simply asking what if the impossible was possible and started manufacturing it. This though is at the core of every Mushkin Innovation. And it's led our engineers to develop everything from industry leading performance gaming memory to some of the most impressive storage technologies on the market. Try our innovations yourself and explore what's possible with Mushkin products.
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%