The Mushkin Source 500GB SATA SSD Review: A Value Proposition For An Everyday PC
by Billy Tallis on November 21, 2018 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The overall performance of the Mushkin Source on The Destroyer is a step backwards from other DRAMless SSDs we've tested recently, including the HP S700 that uses an older generation of Micron 3D TLC NAND.
The average and 99th percentile latencies from the Mushkin Source during The Destroyer are quite high, though not unprecedented given how other DRAMless SSDs have performed. The average latency from the Mushkin Source is slightly better than the Toshiba TR200, but the 99th percentile latency is in last place among this collection of drives.
The three DRAMless drives stand out with substantially higher average read latencies than the mainstream SATA SSDs, and the Mushkin Source is the worst of the three. Average write latencies are very high for the Mushkin Source and the Toshiba TR200, but the HP S700 is only slightly worse off than the slower mainstream drives with DRAM caches.
The DRAMless drives have much higher 99th percentile write latencies than the mainstream SATA drives, but the Mushkin Source's 233ms is not as bad as the 327ms from the TR200. For 99th percentile read latency, the Mushkin Source is in last place and the other two DRAMless drives have scores that are competitive with many of the mainstream drives.
The Mushkin Source requires more energy than most SATA drives to complete The Destroyer, but some of the older mainstream drives that also have generally poor performance use even more energy. The other two DRAMless SSDs have average or slightly above average efficiency on this test despite their low performance.
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Adramtech - Thursday, November 22, 2018 - link
what are you referring to? This uses Micron and it's TLCgglaw - Saturday, November 24, 2018 - link
lol yea, are people not even reading these articles? It is using one of the best selling controllers with a great track record for a low cost one, with Micron's 64L 3D-NAND which also speaks for itself. There is nothing "risky" with this drive. Every aspect of it is very well known.Lolimaster - Thursday, November 22, 2018 - link
Till now you can still get the Samsung 860 EVO for $130.Darcey R. Epperly - Friday, November 23, 2018 - link
Good drive to speed up my Gaming Console. I don't need a high write performance.Samus - Friday, November 23, 2018 - link
Always nice to see competition, but still hard to consider this over an MX500 that sells for virtually the same price.nwarawa - Friday, November 23, 2018 - link
70MB/s seq write?! REALLY?! Makes it garbage as an upgrade. This SSD would be the bottleneck transferring from a HDD... smh.Billy Tallis - Friday, November 23, 2018 - link
Yes, but how often do you really transfer more than 150GB at a time? Even putting a full OS+apps image onto the drive probably wouldn't do that much writing in one shot. If you're only writing tens of GB at a time, this drive is still twice as fast as a hard drive.nwarawa - Friday, November 23, 2018 - link
Personally? Often. I move video folders between drives often as the projects go to cold storage. Laughable that this would be slower than my 4tb HDD at this task. But I upgrade people from HDD storage, or even smaller SSD, ALL THE TIME. MX500 or 860 EVO will image an existing 250GB so much faster.gglaw - Saturday, November 24, 2018 - link
To be fair that's a TINY niche scenario no budget drive is trying to fill. Having a performance drop after >150GB of data is transferred is something most users will encounter a couple times a year at most. Even if they are doing a full drive migration, as Billy pointed it, for most users it won't past the threshold and this is the one and only time a typical user MIGHT encounter the problem. If it adds 5 minutes to the clone time for the handful of GB after 150GB is cloned, that's the least of most users problems.The current prices make no sense either way though. It is way too close to the MX500, but the prices will have to settle into sensible patterns or these will just rot away in warehouses. I imagine the actual sell prices will end up significantly lower than MSRP. For any of my spare home rigs or office computers, the limitations of performance drop after 150GB would not bother me one bit as long as it saved enough cost to justify it. I would gladly take even a steep dropoff at 50GB if it saved several more bucks. The times I would be transferring more than this I would either A) be using my main computer or B) not sitting there waiting on the transfer/clone. I build or upgrade enough systems that anytime a workload even passes the 5 min mark, there's something else I could be working on (or sneaking in another OW match).
dromoxen - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
the price paid in the retail market , specifically Western Markets, is not indicative of the price OEM's pay or say LA/Far Eatern markets .I am noticing a bias against Chinese Brands simply based on their Chinesity?, is this how we stop them taking over the PC components world? HUAWEI e.g.