Mushkin Reactor 512GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, the Mushkin Reactor 512GB solid state drive can be yours for $169.99 at NewEgg, £142.62 at LambdaTek, or starting from €164.90 through Geizhals.

Conclusion

When a company promises a good performance and a lot of capacity for a small price, I get sceptical and I’m sure that it’s the same for most of our readers. The Mushkin Reactor promises these things, and it keeps what it promises. We saw a drive that performed very well for its position as a mainstream drive without it costing a fortune.

Mushkin found a few corners to cut as we saw on the initial introduction page such as using the cheaper Silicon Motion SM2246EN controller as well a different SATA connector. Together with the overall drop in NAND prices, Mushkin is able to deliver a very competitive drive at a good price. We saw a sequential performance up to 555 MB/s reading and 456 MB/s writing which isn’t bad at all. The random performance was equally great with around 70K IOPS when reading and writing. We also saw a drive with an impressively steady performance during the fillage tests and also after the conditioning.

Feature wise we find all the basics including SMART, Trim, Garbage collection, and ECC functionality and the 7mm drive will fit well into most notebooks and ultrabooks as well as normal PCs. It doesn’t feature the newer DevSleep functionality to decrease the power consumption even further during sleep modes, but that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be a great drive in a portable system anyway. It’s a very light SSD which is a great thing for a portable system.

It’s also worth noting that all Muskin’s SSDs are assembled in the US which is something that you’d think would increase the costs over those assembled overseas at cheaper rates, but that’s not the case. The drives are very competitive in their pricing and you get a nice 3-year warranty on top.

Pros

• Good mainstream performance
• Steady performance through all fillage tests
• Same performance after conditioning of the drive
• Cheap costs per GB storage
• Available up to 1TB capacity

Cons

• None

Neutral

• No DevSleep feature
• No SSD Toolbox or Software

“Musking delivers a great performance to price ratio with their Reactor SSD series. The 512GB-sized model that I tested ran through all the benchmarks with great and steady results.”

Thank you Mushkin for providing us with this sample.