Mushkin introduced the an update to its Reactor line of SATA SSDs with the new Reactor Armor3D series. Built in the 7 mm-thick 2.5-inch form-factor with SATA 6 Gbps interface, the drives combine Silicon Motion SM2258 controllers with 3D MLC NAND flash. The drive is available in 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB models. All three offer sequential read speeds of up to 565 MB/s. The sequential write speeds are rated at up to 300 MB/s, 500 MB/s, and 510 MB/s for the 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB models, respectively.

4K random read performance is rated at up to 63,000 IOPS for the 240 GB model, up to 80,000 IOPS for the 480 GB, and up to 77,000 IOPS for the 960 GB model. 4K random write performance of the drives are rated at up to 70,000 IOPS for the 240 GB model, and 80,000 IOPS for the 480 GB and 960 GB. As with all SMI-based drives, the Reactor Armor3D offers LPDC ECC, and SLC cache, which treats a small portion of the MLC NAND flash as SLC, and juggles frequently accessed data in and out of it, for improved performance. The drives are backed by 3-year warranties, and could replace the current Reactor series from the product stack. We expect them to be priced around $90 for the 240 GB model, $160 for the 480 GB, and $270 for the 960 GB.