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
Final Words
The more SM2246EN based SSDs I review, the more I'm convinced that Silicon Motion is becoming a very serious player in the controller market. Despite the use of 16nm NAND, the Reactor is an excellent performer and it also proves that the SM2246EN can handle 1TB of NAND without a hitch (whereas some controllers struggle with high capacities). The power efficiency is also great thanks to slumber power support, making the Reactor a viable option for laptops as well (which was a concern I had with the Transcend SSD370 that we reviewed last week).
My biggest criticism is the fact that Mushkin doesn't offer any lower capacities. In the end, a 1TB SSD will still set you back by over $350, which is why the majority of people are more interested in 128-512GB SSDs. As I mentioned on the introduction page, I suspect this has to do with the limited availability of Micron's 16nm NAND, but once the supply gets better Mushkin should have no problems bringing additional capacities to the market. On the other hand, the 1TB-class SSD market certainly needs more players because there aren't that many models available and only a couple that are value-oriented, so I'm also happy to see that Mushin chose a segment that isn't too crowded yet.
Furthermore, the lack of hardware encryption (TCG Opal 2.0 & eDrive) and software toolbox are also notable shortcomings, but neither of these is critical. Hardware encryption isn't very widely used among consumers due to the lack of freeware software and education, so especially for a value drive like the Reactor it's not a very big deal. As for the toolbox, I would certainly like to see one as it offers the end-user an easy way to monitor the drive, but most of the toolbox functionality can be replaced by freeware software if needed.
| Amazon Price Comparison (2/9/2015) | |
| 960GB/1TB | |
| Mushkin Reactor | $390 |
| Transcend SSD370 | $400 |
| Samsung SSD 850 EVO | $390 |
| Samsung SSD 850 Pro | $610 |
| SanDisk Extreme Pro | $479 |
| SanDisk Ultra II | $390 |
The pricing of the Reactor is very competitive. It's among the cheapest 1TB-class SSDs around, although right now there are two other SSDs (850 EVO & Ultra II) that are priced exactly the same. Out of these three, the 850 EVO would be my number one pick because it's the fastest and has by far the most extensive feature set, but in the past it has been retailing for around $450. I'm not sure whether the current price is due to a sale or if it's a permanent change, but in any case it's the best 1TB SSD deal around at the moment. That said, if the price of the 850 EVO goes up to $450 again, the Reactor will become a better choice because despite the performance and features I don't find the 850 EVO to be worth $60 more.
Either way, the Reactor is without a doubt one of the best value 1TB SSDs around and deserves a recommendation from us. Its performance is good regardless of how intensive the workload is and the performance doesn't come at the cost of power efficiency. To be frank, if I was on a lookout for an affordable 1TB SSD, the Reactor would be one of the first drives I would look at.
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nathanddrews - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
That didn't stop them from releasing 1TB SSDs for $800, which have conveniently come down...rahuldesai1987 - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Samsung 860 Evo is likely to be 2TB.Christopher1 - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link
Who would need all that space on an SSD save an uber-gamer? I personally put an SSD in my laptop but I download and store all my stuff to an external hard drive that is a USB 3 spinny disk.Greg100 - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link
What??? I am still waiting for Samsung PM863 - 3.84TB capacity in 2.5" form factor! The price doesn't matter. I will buy two or three of them.Levish - Thursday, January 14, 2016 - link
Mostly it comes down to supply vs demand, imagine if for example Samsung released a Hypothetical 1TB EVO SATA 6Gbps at $50 - $100 and a pro at $125 - $150 pretty much no one else would sell a consumer / oem SSD.What kills me is the pricing difference of M.2 NVMe disks, other than the initial R&D to produce they should be way cheaper than SATA varieties
Tom Womack - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link
1TB is enough for most laptops, and few cases are short enough of space or SATA ports that you can't strap together two 1TB drives in RAID0, so there's very little pressure to produce 2TB drives at less than twice the price of 1TB drives; if you want 4TB of SSD tomorrow you can buy four drives and fiddle around a little with Molex-to-SATA-passthrough power adaptors.Cpt. Obvious - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link
There's also a big push for cloud services. Local storage is often seen as unreliable and inconvenient, especially when the user is supposed to be using several platforms to access the same data. And let's be honest, the cloud services are very convenient, when they work.The big problem with cloud storage, in my opinion at least, is bandwidth. For most people It's simply not efficient to work with large volumes of data over the internet. Even many popular games are running into several gigabytes. Recently I reinstalled a game that's a few years old, Borderlands, and the download from Steam was over 12GB. That's not something I'd like to run from a cloud storage. But even then I could fit 80 games of this size on a one TB SSD.
Movies is another subject. A 1080p movie stored in a good quality can be about 20 - 25 GB, so that 1TB drive could house about 40 of these. However movies are generally read sequentially, and they don't need a very high transfer rate so they are prime candidates for storing on cheap HDD's in a NAS and / or using cloud storage.
So where is the multi TB SSD demand in the consumer market today? I think 4K video editing is one of the few cases where consumers may need multi TB SSD's. Note that I say "need" not "want", because I for one sure "want" as large a SSD as I can get for a reasonable price. I might not fill it up, but I still want it...
When it comes to professional use things are a lot different. If you work with huge sets of data you will need both large and fast storage. But then again that is already available, though at prices thats out of range for most end users.
cm2187 - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Particularly upload bandwidth. In my country most optic fibre providers only have upload speeds a tenth of the download speed. Most pictures today are 2-6MB out of the camera (mobile to DSLR). A photo roll from a birthday or a trip can be pretty long to upload. And we are not even talking audio or video.Plus there is the trust issue. Do you really want to upload all your private life to the internet?
Christopher1 - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link
Actually, a 1080p in H.265 format (the one that people are switching to) should be only 1GB, tops for a two-hour movie in 23.9-24 fps at a pretty high Kbps.Yes, movies are usually read sequentially but the problem is that many drives do not store data sequentially.
Every single time I download a TV show, I have to defrag the hard drive or the file itself to get it sequential on a spinny disk hard drive and play it's best.
Christopher1 - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link
Local storage is one of the most reliable things in the world today, especially since a lot of cloud hosters are now doing the insanity of removing anything that is 'flagged' by their systems as 'possibly pirated'. I just would not trust them with my data.