The Mushkin Source 500GB SATA SSD Review: A Value Proposition For An Everyday PC

AnandTech 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.