Over the past couple of years, the SSD market has started to move away from the SATA connector. One of the more popular connectors is the M.2 which uses PCIe lanes for transport. To bolster their ever-growing lineup of SSDs, Mushkin has announced their new Helix series of drives.
The Helix comes in the full-size M.2-2280 form-factor with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. Sporting the SM 2260 controller, the new drive features 3D MLC NAND and is aimed squarely at the performance and premium desktop and laptop market. The drives come in 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB capacities.
Due to the use of custom firmware, Mushkin has been able to improve on the basic SM 2260 performance. With sequential reads at 2.5 GB/s, write performance at up to 1.1 GB/s and 232K/185K 4KB read/write IOPS, performance is much improved over the best SATA offerings. Of course, this is with pseudo-SLC caching enabled which most drives have these days.
There is no word yet on pricing or availability. Due to the ongoing NAND shortage, it may be a while before we see the Helix and if it is popular, it may be hard to find in stores.
