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 - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
When the Heavy test is run on an empty drive, the Mushkin Source offers performance that is not too far behind many mainstream SATA drives. When the test is run on a full drive, the story is very different, and the Source's average data rate is lower than any of the other drives in this bunch, including the other two DRAMless SSDs.
The average and 99th percentile latencies from the Mushkin Source during the Heavy test are reasonable when the test is run on an empty drive, but when the drive is full both scores are worse than either of the other DRAMless SSDs in this bunch.
The average read and write latencies of the Mushkin Source are both severely inflated when the drive is full, beyond what the other DRAMless SSDs suffer. But unlike the Toshiba TR200, the Mushkin Source handles both reads and writes well when the drive isn't full.
When the Heavy test is run on a full drive, the Mushkin Source has far worse read QoS than any of the other drives; even the HP S700's 99th percentile read latency is no more than twice as high when the test drive is full, but the Mushkin Source's 99th percentile latency gets an order of magnitude worse. For 99th percentile write latency, the Mushkin Source isn't much worse off than other DRAMless SSDs, and at least it does not have the empty-drive performance problems of the TR200.
The disparity in performance between full and empty drive test runs carries through to the energy usage measurements. When the Heavy test is run on an empty drive and the Mushkin Source is able to make good use of its SLC cache, the power efficiency is also very good. When the drive is full and bogged down with too much background garbage collection, the energy usage is significantly worse than the rest of the drives in this review.
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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.