Mushkin Releases Reactor Armor3D Series SATA SSD

During the first couple of years, SSDs advanced by leaps and bounds. Performance and capacities rapidity increased and new drives offered dramatic improvements. Over time, the drives began to hit the limits of the SATA interface. Updates are now more incremental due to budget drives being good enough. SSD manufacturers have shifted the goal from just performance but also to expand the reach of SSDs. Mushkin is releasing a new update to their lineup, the Reactor Armor3D Series SATA SSD.

As part of the Reactor lineup, the drives sit above the budget TLC drives. Using the popular Silicon Motion Industries 2258 controller, Mushkin has chosen 3D MLC NAND. This should allow the 7 mm-thick 2.5-inch form factor SATA 6 Gbps drive to beat out its TLC compatriots. As with all SMI 2258 based drives, the Reactor Armor3D features LPDC ECC, and SLC cache to boost performance. As a result of using 3D MLC, steady state performance should still be good even when the SLC cache gets filled up.

The drives comes in 240 GB, 480 GB and 960 GB capacities, with 300 MB/s, 500 MB/s, and 510 MB/s sequential read performance respectively. Sequential read performance is flat across the board at 565 MB/s. 4K random read performance ranges from 63K to 80K IOPs and 4K random write at 70K to 80K IOPs. Since the Reactor Armor3D is a mainstream drive, the warranty is the standard 3 years. Mushkin will likely price the drives at $90 for the 240 GB model, $160 for the 480 GB, and $270 for the 960 GB.