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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benedict - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
This needs to be less than 10$/GB to make any sense.deil - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
it might be, wait 3-4 months from initial start. Still its cheapest 500 GB I've seen so far, and that is good sign.Small Bison - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
Yeah, charging over five thousand dollars for a 500GB DRAM-less drive *does* seem like a bit much.excelle08 - Thursday, November 22, 2018 - link
Well you aren't referring to US Dollars, right?😂PeachNCream - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
The scatter plots on pages 6 and 7 may benefit from the addition of color to differentiate storage types. As they stand, they're difficult to extract meaningful data from for a few reasons, but the worst offenders are too many data points in the given space and poor contrast between data types.Billy Tallis - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
The purpose of those scatter plots isn't to enable comparing the highlighted drive against any particular competitor, but to show where it falls relative to the limits of what is possible/normal. The data points for the non-highlighted drives are deliberately low-contrast because their exact value or identity aren't what's important for that graph. They're supposed to blend into a cloud.PeachNCream - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
Hmm, well I wasn't implying that there ought to be individual products highlighted. I was suggesting that using a categorical color in addition to the shape would help with overall visibility. For example, make TLC red, MLC green, and Optane black or something. It would allow us to extrapolate trend-like significance to the categories that were defined in the chart and position the Source among them.Great_Scott - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
SSD prices are so compressed right now that I'm considering getting a Samsung 860 EVO... as the 'cheap' option.There's really no point in getting a 'budget' 2.5" form-factor drive as every brand falls within about a 10% total price range.
Ratman6161 - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
Absolutely. In the SATA space, there is no reason to even look at anything other than the Samsung 860 EVO or the Crucial MX500. The 860 EVO is even cheaper than this piece of junk at the 1 TB level and only $7 less at 500 GB. There is no reason for this drive to exist unless they cut the price...a lot.heffeque - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
Well the BX500 is a pretty decent drive and is somewhat cheaper than both 860EVO and MX500.