Final Thoughts
So before I go on to praise this drive, let’s first talk about its downfalls, because yes it does have some. First it is a SandForce-based drive using the date SF-2281 controller, which we of course have seen in the past. While these drives do offer great performance typically, when it comes to incompressible data the drive will not perform as great. This is not just an issue with this drive specifically, but with all SandForce SF-2200 based solid state drives. This is also a pretty plain-jane drive. It does not have a cool design that you might want to show off in your case and it does not come with any accessories or software. But of course that is because this drive is made to save you, the consumer money.
The drive sure gives you a great bang for your buck and one of the best prices we have ever seen for a solid state drive. How good are the prices? The 240 GB drive that we reviewed today is selling for $84.99, that is only $0.35 per GB! The highest capacity drive, which is the 480GB is only slightly more expensive at $159.99 which gives you an even better price per GB at $0.33. At these prices it is really hard not to choose a one of these drives over say a traditional hard drive where your performance is going to be much, much lower. It is great to see a company like Mushkin come out with aggressive pricing like this to get SSDs in the hands of more people.
When it does come to performance the drive performs right up to its advertised speeds of 550 MB/s read and 530 MB/s write. So again choosing this drive over a mechanical drive will improve Windows boot time and file transfers tremendously.
On top of all that Mushkin backs this drive with a 3-year warranty and the drive is assembled in the USA. Overall ThinkComputers gives this drive a 9 out of 10 score and our Good Value Award!
Pros:
– Price
– Good performance
– 3 year warranty
– Assembled in the USA
Cons:
– No accessories or software included
– Drawbacks of SandForce controller
