Mushkin Introduces the Updated Chronos G2 SSD

Mushkin is no stranger in the memory market and their SSDs and memory are well-known. As such, they’ve just released their latest addition to the Chronos family of Solid State Drives, the Chronos G2. This isn’t an entirely new drive, but rather a refresh of an old drive with improved components, and probably improved firmware as well. The new Chronos G2 is available in four sizes: 60, 120, 240 and 480 GB; so there should be a fit for almost every usage need.

“If you want the most innovative Mushkin SSD ever, you’ll have to be more specific. Mushkin doesn’t only focus on launching new and innovative storage and memory solutions, we are always looking for new ways to enhance our existing products as we are doing with our value Chronos G2,” said Nicolas Villalobos, Director of Global Marketing at Mushkin Inc. “A reincarnation of the legendary Chronos, the Chronos G2 Series was born to stand out from the crowd. Its competition-surpassing value give Mushkin’s Value SSD an oversized attitude.”

The Chronos G2 is a budget oriented drive, designed for the user who doesn’t want to blow his wallet on a new drive upgrade. It still promises some great performance figures, with up to 555 MB/s readi and up to 535 MB/s at write speeds. The drive also delivers a random write performance of up to 90K IOPS. However, the performance figures do vary quite a bit depending on the capacity, but this might just be the product pages that aren’t fully updated yet. For example the IOPS were only given for the 480 GB model and not for the three smaller ones.

The new drive is rated for 1.5 million hours before failure and comes with a 3-year limited warranty. Muskin used a SandForce SF-2000 series controller for this drive, a choice some will love and some will hate. One of the big improvements in this version is the use of high grade MLC flash instead of asyncron flash like the previous model. The drives support S.M.A.R.T., TRIM and NCQ. While the product page states that the drive is 7 mm high, it might actually be 9.5 mm instead; at least when looking at the shop listings.

The drives are available at some retailers and more listings will surely follow as stock arrives. At the time of writing the 480 GB model can be had for £177.96 (£0,37 per GB) via Amazon UK and the 60 GB model can be had for £47.39 (£0.79 per GB). Our US readers can find the drives at newegg among others for a price of $49.99 for the 60 GB model ($0.83 per GB) and the 480 GB drive can be had for $199.99 ($0.42 per GB).

With the ever-growing security concerns some people have, it might be worth noting here that Mushkin designs and assembles their drives in the U.S.A. It is up to the individual user what they prefer in the direction of manufacturing locations, but it’s great to see companies giving us the option to choose.

I noticed that a lot of retailers haven’t labelled the new drive as G2 but rather just as Mushkin Chronos. You can however spot the difference in the product number as all the new drives end in “-G2”, for example MKNSSDCR60GB-G2 .

Thank you Mushkin for providing us with these information

Image courtesy of Mushkin