Mushkin Shows Off a 500-Dollar 4 TB SSD

[GhostRyder]

Sounds like other company's are either doing it wrong or they are just plain ripping us off.

Yea, I still want to see some reviews because its such a low price its kind of blowing my mind!

My current game drive is a 4 TB Seagate mechanical. These would be a drop-in replacement. Can't ask for much more, at least for now. I mean, 8 TB for $500 would be nice, but given that a decent 4 TB mechanical still costs a fair bit....

Amen, I would love to have three of these (Or cheaper priced 2tb options with similar ratios) to put in raid 5 on my desktop!

 

[Octavean]

Good news for my new home server project.
Cant wait to scrap those old vibrating HDDs.
Only need 2TB tough, limitation of WHS2011.

Wow, WHS2011, that takes me back,.....

I don't recall being impeded by a 2TB limit in WHS2011. WHS v1 yes but not WHS2011. I think there is an easy way around it if there is such a limitation. Stablebit Drive pool might help with that or some other third-party application.

Edit

The drive uses 3D MLC NAND flash

I was expecting to see TLC at that price.

 

[Phobia9651]

Little correction:
$500 / 4000 GB = $ 0.13 per GB
Which makes it even more amazing

A quick check tells me that in my country the Sandisk Ultra II (960GB) holds the crown atm with € 0.26 per GB.

 

[RejZoR]

Too bad its gonna be limited in performance (random anyway) with a crappy raid controller...

Also, pricing per gigabyte is wrong.

Btw, now @RejZoR has no excuse not to buy one

Now I want M.2 NVMe/AHCI version. Using SATA is just silly to be quite honest.

 

[ChaoticG8R]

Gorgeous. A new standard for laptops imo.

 

[hojnikb]

Now I want M.2 NVMe/AHCI version. Using SATA is just silly to be quite honest.

and when pcie drives will be cheap enough, there will be something better (like 3d xpoint) and its gonna be the same story allover again

 

[RejZoR]

I don't think that'll be the case but SATA3 is really ancient (and slow) tech. We've been stuck at 550MB/s for way too long now. Plus, M.2 means HDD cage will be empty, less cables and better airflow. Which I like.

 

[JBB]

Which version is $500, the 2TB (which aligns with the $0.25/GB stated in the article) or the 4TB (claimed in the headline)?

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

My laptop is ready for this 2TB goodness.

 

[Prima.Vera]

SATA 6 should die a quick dead. Bullet in the head.
There is no reason now not to make an M.2 NVM PCI-E drive with the similar tech.

 

[hojnikb]

I don't think that'll be the case but SATA3 is really ancient (and slow) tech. We've been stuck at 550MB/s for way too long now. Plus, M.2 means HDD cage will be empty, less cables and better airflow. Which I like.

i never would have though to see 100k iops being slow.

sequential speeds matter jack shit, everyone knows that.
and unless youre hammering your drives with some serious IO (think multiple VMs running some heavy databases) sata6g is still plenty fast for pretty much everyone (that includes you and me).

but obviously having a fast pcie drive, thats fast on paper but happens to be almost on par with sata drives in real world... well, thats just great for bragging on the forums


personally, ill take bigger and more reliable ssd any day of the week, even if that means sacrificing some performance
none of that tlc crap for me. if people realized how crappy flash is used nowdays in ssds, they would never even touch them, let alone store data in there.

 

[PP Mguire]

Drive speed is a big deal if you're running a heavy server load that isn't holding critical data that this drive would suit me good. I would love for this to be on an M.2 stick but there's way too many chips for that currently which is why the highest we've seen so far is 1TB. Once they start rolling out higher capacity chips we'll see bigger M.2 with the faster speeds.

PCI-E drives are significantly better for lossless game recording which can get held back by drive speed.

 

[hojnikb]

Drive speed is a big deal if you're running a heavy server load that isn't holding critical data that this drive would suit me good. I would love for this to be on an M.2 stick but there's way too many chips for that currently which is why the highest we've seen so far is 1TB. Once they start rolling out higher capacity chips we'll see bigger M.2 with the faster speeds.

PCI-E drives are significantly better for lossless game recording which can get held back by drive speed.

well you can either have high speed or high density. cant have both, thats just how flash works.

 

[PP Mguire]

well you can either have high speed or high density. cant have both, thats just how flash works.

Can wait or RAID 0 two of these which would be enough speed and way more density than required, but think RAID 0 with 3 1TB drives might be much better and cheaper. Idk game recording lossless isn't that big of a deal to me, just just putting that out there.

 

[RejZoR]

Well, I'm not swiching storage drives often. Buying already obsolete tech now would just be a very bad investment. For HDD's it just doesn't matter even if it's SATA1. M.2 on the other hand, we just started receiving good NVMe/AHCI drives now. Especially becasue when I'll go SSD, I'll go full SSD. No more spinning drives anymore. At all. So, I'm kinda picky abou that, because of that.

 

[PP Mguire]

Looking at a 4TB SSD it would be going in my server which really doesn't need much more than SATA3 anyways because I'm not running 10Gb.

 

[hojnikb]

Can wait or RAID 0 two of these which would be enough speed and way more density than required, but think RAID 0 with 3 1TB drives might be much better and cheaper. Idk game recording lossless isn't that big of a deal to me, just just putting that out there.

well, with raid0 you only profit on sequential speeds. 4k will still be limited to one drives performance or even worse.

Btw, does lossless recording really take that much write bandwidth ?

 

[hojnikb]

Well, I'm not swiching storage drives often. Buying already obsolete tech now would just be a very bad investment. For HDD's it just doesn't matter even if it's SATA1. M.2 on the other hand, we just started receiving good NVMe/AHCI drives now. Especially becasue when I'll go SSD, I'll go full SSD. No more spinning drives anymore. At all. So, I'm kinda picky abou that, because of that.

How is sata obsolete again ? It might not be as fast as pcie drives, but its still plenty fast for the money. Its not like there is a day-and-night difference between a decent sata ssd and an entry level nvme drive. Look it up http://techreport.com/review/28446/samsung-sm951-pcie-ssd-reviewed/5

I still think that ~10-20k IOPS (sequential doesnt really matter) is plenty enough for most desktop users out there.

 

[RejZoR]

I was determined to grab a Samsung 850 2TB once price drops to a good level. But then I bought Samsung SM951 for SSD caching purposes because it is nicely hidden on the motherboard and I got blown away by it's speed. That's why I'm tripping on M.2 now. But yeah, it may take a while before they can stick 2TB on a M.2 stick as well as the price issue. M.2's are automatically more expensive. I don't know, I'm quite happy with current hybrid setup, that's why I'm hesitating so much. And I trust spinning plates more than chips. I've seen way too many SSD's that decided to go dead because of simple power outage or system crash. I have never seen or heard anything like that for HDD's. They always start showing symptoms before they die entirely.

 

[PP Mguire]

well, with raid0 you only profit on sequential speeds. 4k will still be limited to one drives performance or even worse.

Btw, does lossless recording really take that much write bandwidth ?

Raw transfer is what you need for something like that. Using NVC and the lossless setting I can make a 4 second video that's over 5GB. Using commands and the CPU that could be 10GB. If the drive can't write fast enough you'll have hiccups. Of course that's 4k 60fps. I can easily write to my current solutions with 1080p 60fps.

 

[hojnikb]

I was determined to grab a Samsung 850 2TB once price drops to a good level. But then I bought Samsung SM951 for SSD caching purposes because it is nicely hidden on the motherboard and I got blown away by it's speed. That's why I'm tripping on M.2 now. But yeah, it may take a while before they can stick 2TB on a M.2 stick as well as the price issue. M.2's are automatically more expensive. I don't know, I'm quite happy with current hybrid setup, that's why I'm hesitating so much. And I trust spinning plates more than chips. I've seen way too many SSD's that decided to go dead because of simple power outage or system crash. I have never seen or heard anything like that for HDD's. They always start showing symptoms before they die entirely.

Honestly, a pm951 would be a much better buy. Might not have the same sequential speeds, but much better random speeds due to NVMe.
Unless you got SM951-NVme, thats a different beast entirely.

 

[RejZoR]

I have the SM951 AHCI. It's slightly slower than NVMe. I didn't pay attention to model, thought they were the same so I took the cheaper one. Though the difference was very small. Then I did proper research and noticed I made a bit of a cockup. Still, it's 1,5GB/s read, 1GB/s write and like 100k IOPS. Which is like woooooh compared to a SATA drive that's using USB thumbdrive controller.

 

[hojnikb]

I have the SM951 AHCI. It's slightly slower than NVMe. I didn't pay attention to model, thought they were the same so I took the cheaper one. Though the difference was very small. Then I did proper research and noticed I made a bit of a cockup. Still, it's 1,5GB/s read, 1GB/s write and like 100k IOPS. Which is like woooooh compared to a SATA drive that's using USB thumbdrive controller.

Every semi decent sata drive will pull 100k IOPS

NVMe drives can hit 300k IOPS... Even the cheap pm951 can hit 270k IOPS...

High Sequential speeds is for sheeps that dont know better. And maybe very specific workloads.

 

[RejZoR]

It's always better to have more than less. If it wasn't, we'd all be fine with normal HDD's...

 

[hojnikb]

It's always better to have more than less. If it wasn't, we'd all be fine with normal HDD's...

more is not always better. i for one love less and less latency

as for your compare... well you can get hdds that have quite a bit faster write speeds than ssds (thanks tlc) yet those ssds blow away hdds in real world usage. so more is not always better. but higher numbers sure sell better