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 - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The average data rate from the Mushkin Source running the Light test is a bit slower than most mainstream SSDs, but the performance deficit is only severe when the test is run on a full drive.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores for the Mushkin Source are typical for SATA SSDs when the Light test is run on an empty drive, but when the drive is full both latency measures are out of control (though not quite the worst we've seen).
When the Mushkin Source is full, the average write latency degrades much more than the average read latency, which merely doubles rather than growing by a factor of four.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies from running the Light test on a completely full Mushkin Source are both higher than even the other DRAMless SSDs. The 99th percentile write latency grows much more than read score, but both are stark outliers.
In spite of the poor performance when full, the Mushkin Source manages to have reasonable power efficiency when running the Light test on a full drive. When testing an empty drive, the Mushkin Source is significantly more efficient than the mainstream SATA SSDs that must power a DRAM cache.
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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.