Mushkin ECO2 SandForce-based SSDs new arrival $40/$55/$80/$170 @ Newegg

[DesiPower]

120GB is on 10:00 AM CDT shell shocker today. regular price is $55, so I guessing it will be $45? anybody receiver their shell shocker email?

 

[alaricljs]

Yeah, $50 for the 120G... And the 60G is now in stock @$40. Looking like 120's for me.

 

[Mike64]

Yeah, $50 for the 120G... And the 60G is now in stock @$40. Looking like 120's for me.

I'm liking the prices of this new line in general, but at a "whopping" $5-6 discount, I'm not feeling any pressure to jump on today's SS... Might as well let the earliest adopters benchmark 'em and check for obvious f/w issues first. Needless to say, any complaints, justifiable or otherwise, will show up on Newegg faster than the thing's rated speed.

Good price, but the 850 EVO is on sale or was last night, for 180 for the 500GB model.

The promo code is good until tomorrow. But even at the regular $200, it's probably a better deal if you're looking for a large drive. There's a bigger price discrepancy on the smaller drives, though.

 

[DesiPower]

Mushkin has been making pretty solid products till now and there aren't many complaints about their rated specs either, they claim to be all American company iirc. Now, for this particular product, they have not released detailed specs, only data available are -
Read Speed: up to 550MB/sec
Write Speed: up to 530MB/sec
IOPS: 86,000 (4K random write)
But for this price, historically, only crappy buggy SSDs were available. This one at least we know, should be reliable, now Mary Jane did move to Colorado not too long ago, not sure if that effected them

 

[TemjinGold]

Question for you fine folks: My brother was going to give me his old Intel G2 160gb for my PS3 (I actually gave him mine for his a while back!) but with the Mushkin 240 gb at $80, I'm thinking of just buying that instead. I'm assuming the PS3 has no trim. Is that Mushkin a good idea given that? Thanks!

 

[DesiPower]

Is it the X25 that came out in 2009ish? that is much slower than ECO2... but if your brother is "giving" it to you and it does not cost anything then might as well stick to it for now. There are no benchmarks or reviews available for these ECO2 yet, so i would wait for that or go with other SSDs.

 

[alaricljs]

The Mushkins are SandForce which has previously had good garbage collection to deal with non-Trim situations. I don't expect that the latest spin of SF's goods got rid of that feature.

 

[hojnikb]

The Mushkins are SandForce which has previously had good garbage collection to deal with non-Trim situations. I don't expect that the latest spin of SF's goods got rid of that feature.

Given how sandforce pretty much ignores trim alltogether, thats not really surprising.

 

[hojnikb]

Great prices, but controller choice kills it.
I bet at this point, sandforce must be giving these controllers away, given how old it is at this point.

Also, no word on the nand, so it could be crappy async, like the one found in v300.

 

[TemjinGold]

Is it the X25 that came out in 2009ish? that is much slower than ECO2... but if your brother is "giving" it to you and it does not cost anything then might as well stick to it for now. There are no benchmarks or reviews available for these ECO2 yet, so i would wait for that or go with other SSDs.

Yep it is indeed THAT X25-M.

 

[TemjinGold]

The Mushkins are SandForce which has previously had good garbage collection to deal with non-Trim situations. I don't expect that the latest spin of SF's goods got rid of that feature.

Ahh, so this would be BETTER than a non-SF drive for a PS3 then?

 

[DesiPower]

60GB is back in stock, $40 FS

 

[bbhaag]

Got my 120 in today. Spent an hour or so on the phone with Newegg to comp me the lower price. Here are the initial numbers. I used AS SSD to test the drives. The Mushkin is empty and the Crucial is my main OS drive. I just did one pass for both drives.
The Mushkin is on the left the Crucial is on the right.

 

[DesiPower]

wow, pretty sad looking read speeds all over and M500 is not even their fastest drive...

Thanks for posting!

 

[richierich1212]

With SSDs the larger the capacity, the faster the drive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Thanks for the benchmarks. Can you benchmark compressible data versus incompressable with AS-SSD? (On the ECO2 120GB?) If the two results are strikingly different, that may indicate the presence of Async NAND.

It's a little hard to compare your M500 to the ECO2, because one is 240GB and one is 120, which should be half the speed.

 

[bbhaag]

I should have mentioned that I'm using an older AM3 platform. The chipset is the AMD 880G/SB850. For anyone interested here is link to my MB specs.
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M4A88TDMUSB3/specifications/

I should have also mentioned that I do not update my drivers on a regular basis but I do not think updated drivers would help the Mushkin.

My initial thoughts are that this drive is mediocre at best.

 

[bbhaag]

Thanks for the benchmarks. Can you benchmark compressible data versus incompressable with AS-SSD? If the two results are strikingly different, that may indicate the presence of Async NAND.

Sorry we posted at the same time. I don't know of a benchmark program that does that. Can you recommend one?
I will do any benchmarks you guys want me too just name them so I can dl and run them. I'll post the results here.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I don't know which benchmark does that, but I thought AS-SSD gave you an option.

 

[bbhaag]

It might let explore the options. I usually just click start and let it do its thing.
EDIT:I think I found it. Let me know. This was done on the Mushkin not the Crucial.

 

[hojnikb]

Wow, those speeds are really poor, even for a 120GB drive.

Looks like an async drive afterall (because sync would pull 500MB/s+ read even at 60GB).

 

[DesiPower]

yeah, given the price, there had to be a catch, you get what you pay for... well, thanks to bbhaag, now we know!

I am still happy that the price war has begun! many customers will not go looking for the benchmark, they will just be happy that they are getting cheap SSD and that eat up into other maker's markets and forcing them to sell cheaper... let the bloodbath begin!!!

 

[cbn]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820226677

I think that the 60GB model hits a new price low for a brand-new 60GB drive ($39.99, OOS).

$40 is a good price for 60GB.

I'm hoping we see that price floor for 60GB drop even lower considering I'm now seeing M.2 drives for as low as $19.99 on Newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA53D1P54087

Now granted that is only 8GB, but according to the following link it has the same Phison S9 controller as the other My digital Super Boot Drives (which have capacities up to 256 GB) . I thinking once manufacturers get the price of NAND down enough eventually we should see 64 GB drives drop to $19.99 as well. Ideally these inexpensive drives (with Phison and other affordable controllers) would also be available in 2.5" form factor.

http://www.mydigitalssd.com/sata-m2-ngff-ssd.php

P.S. Here are the test results (from the link above) of the My digital Super Boot M.2 2242 64 GB:

Anandtech also did a review of the My digital Super Boot M.2 2242 256 GB drive in a chromebook:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8543/upgrading-the-ssd-in-a-chromebook

 

[cbn]

Another option to consider is the Patriot Blaze:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-893-_-Product

OOS right now as well but $34.99 when the egg has it in stock.
Not sure how good the Phison controller is, good capacity/prices for cache drives or OS/primary app drives for some older system refreshes though.

Here is a review of the 120 GB model:

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/6924/patriot-blaze-120gb-low-cost-ssd-review/index.html

It also has the Phison S9 controller (which by its very design lacks DRAM).

Here were the results of the sequential read:

Notice only the Phison S9 drives are the ones with variation in min, average, and maximum read speeds. Here is what tweak town wrote about that:

The Blaze 120GB was unable to read sequential data at a consistent pace in our test. The Torch 120GB was the same way when we tested it. I think the lack of a DRAM buffer to cache the table data played a role in the wide separation between minimum and maximum performance.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Some Newegg reviews starting to trickle in, mostly on the 240GB model. Seems like Async NAND after all. Guess I'm not too surprised, given the price.