Mushkin Triactor SSD Review

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you've used language that we don't like to see around here, you're argumentative, you'e got an attitude, drop it or we drop you. Understand?
 


You simply do not know what you're talking about, it's already happening now:

"Starting in October, the DemoEval lab will be hosting clusters for Silicon Valley startups using all NVMe SSDs. A year ago, these were SAS/ SATA clusters so the change is clearly upon us."
https://www.servethehome.com/going-fast-inexpensively-48tb-of-near-sata-pricing-nvme-ssds/
Click to expand...

There's no point clinging to old obsolete, outdated and super slow technology that is capped at super slow speeds with an AHCI interface that will never ever get beyond 600MB/s. SATA has been a huge bottleneck keeping HD's and storage super slow for years. Defending the future for SATA is a losing strategy.

"sata, it takes up next to no mobo real estate"

LOL, who are you trying to fool? Most every motherboard is covered with SATA and the AHCI interface and it will eventually be replaced and leave the 1980's tech for HD's in last century where it belongs. If that's all you need I'm fine with that but, I will move on ... preferably without being badgered to death for it.

"You can't call a technology obsolete until it has NO place in the market"

I am not the first to call SATA obsolete and yes we can call it what it is, obsolete - VGA was obsolete for about 10 years, yet, it was still on motherboards until just a few years ago. But it was cheap. If you just want cheap, outdated superslow tech, no sweat off my balls as I could care less. I chose to replace SATA so, there's no excuse for anybody to attempt to badger me into sticking with SATA when it will soon to be obsolete tech that needs to go to SATA heaven because it is so slow. You do all of us a disservice arguing for SATA - a losing strategy. SATA is dead to me. SATA will be around for awhile for those who rae fine with grandma speeds but, they should also provide motherboard options replacing SATA for those of us who prefer to move on out of the last century - why some of you get your knickers in a bunch over that is your own issue not mine.

Quote from an article over a year old: "SATA and AHCI are already on their way out, being replaced by PCIe and NVMe. That removes most of the abstraction that is actually obsolete"

"By your logic, we should have dropped SATA a long time ago"

Nope, now you're just being fallacious or dishonest as I've already noted above in previous posts that SATA will likely not be removed before 2020. So, stop trolling and inventing false info just to defend your beloved SATA that is obsolete no matter how much you want to cling to it.



NVLINK Unified Virtual Memory (UVM) = 5 to 12 times faster than PCIE 3.0
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-volta-gpus-sc15/

Also check into CCIX, OpenCAPI, and Gen-Z.

; )
 


While I was not aware of that particular SSD, pointing to one company that deployed one particular product for it's data centers does not mean that the product category is primed for large scale deployment. Furthermore, I can't find a single price quote on that SSD. I have found multiple reviews, but the only pricing I can find on it outside of the article is a $1/GB refurb piece. That is more expensive than SATA SSDs and significantly more expensive than HDDs.




What 13thmonkey meant by real estate was physical space required on the board for traces leading up to the connector. If you don't separate traces that carry the same signal/power level, SATA requires 5 traces per port, NVMe x4 requires 29 traces per port. If you do separate your traces, you're looking at 7 traces per port and 64 traces per port. IDK if you've ever done much PCB design, but trust me when I say that that is a significant extra engineering effort per motherboard. And no matter how well you engineer it, unless you increase the number of layers on the board, it will significantly hamper your ability to put other components on the board.

But, my assumption is that when the time comes mITX boards will just grow to be 12 layer boards and increase noticeably in cost, or sacrifice a few other things on the board. mATX and larger boards could support it fairly easily since they already have extra PCIe connectors on the board.



The definition of obsolete is that it has fallen out of general use. People like you who want more performance, can actually put it to use (presumably), and have the money to pay for it are not counted in general. You are the elite. Even if you stop using SATA, which makes sense if budget's not an issue and you want the perf, you can't call SATA obsolete until it's a bad recommendation for the average user. As it stands, there is no reason for the home/office/gaming user building/buying a PC under $1200 to go for an NVMe drive when their money is better spent elsewhere. While I don't have exact stats, I highly doubt that a majority of people have computers that cost more than $1k.



Here I was referring to your premise that a faster and more transparent standard makes an older one obsolete without regards to cost concerns or engineering concerns. SAS is superior to SATA in every way that NVMe is and has existed for much longer. If indeed your premise was correct, why did we not switch to SAS and drop SATA a long time ago?

In my opinion SATA will last at least a few years into the 20s. Why? Well consider that the rate at which prices are declining in the SSD market, mean that NVMe SSDs won't be comparable to SATA in price for at least another 2-4 years (the price of SATA SSDs is falling too and NVMe SSDs have a lot of ground to cover). Then consider that most people do not upgrade their motherboard more than once every 4 years. This would mean that SATA would remain in the market for at least the next 6-8 years. And that is assuming they start coming out with SSDs in greater capacities than 2TB or it becomes easier to put more than 1-2 NVMe SSDs into a system because our data needs are growing very fast. 6 years ago, 1TB was a lot of storage, now it's almost a minimum.



I'm quite excited about NVLINK actually, but I doubt it'll make it's way out of server or special purpose computing market. My understanding for CCIX was that it was a processor interconnect standard, and not for peripherals, but I could be wrong. OpenCAPI sounds very interesting as well, and I imagine more non x86 PCs will suddenly start becoming more relevant if they are able to share large add in cards with x86 PCs. However, I don't see the incentive for x86 CPU manufacturers to support it (maybe in their SoCs). Gen-Z and XPoint are definitely going to take the market by storm once they hit the general market.

 
You just said above, 'I will move on ... preferably without being badgered to death for it.'

Fine do so, but stop badgering everyone else who vaguely disagrees with you, or has a slightly different opinion, the only person badgering anyone is you.
 


I'm doing a little badgering. I just like picking arguments. There's something relaxing and stress relieving about typing out an argument/rebuttal.
 


Well, I apologize for putting words in your mouth, but I was just assuming that we were ignoring M.2. because if you want to phase out SATA in favor of M.2, there are a lot of problems with that. I was thinking U.2(sff-8639) or similar for NVMe drives.
 


a cabled solution is necessary imo. I'm more concerned with capacity than speed though for the vast bulk of my data GBe is the limitation. Being able to open something an extra 0.5s quicker is not an issue, i'll just blink an extra time.
 
The price on SSD is now cheap enough I'm not even going to consider a platter driver when I build my next gaming rig. Didn't know Mushkin had a plant in Texas though. I will give them extra consideration in the future.
 
To LOGAINOFHADES, there's a World of difference between a 512GB 960 PRO M.2 & Samsung 500GB 850 EVO, and having one of each, am qualified to say. The 850 uses a gimmick in RAPID to make the SSD look fast (some benchmark sites will disqualify the user for having it enabled), just like Windows 8 & above computers uses FastBoot, another gimmick to make users with low spec hardware to think their computers are booting faster, when in reality, it's being awakened. Bad for long term battery life on notebooks also.

My 512GB Samsung 950 PRO reads at over 2,500MB/sec & writes at over 1,600MB/sec w/out gimmicks. The Samsung 850 EVO reads at close to 530MB/sec & writes at 500MB/sec (the latter on a good day), reads are constant between 520-530MB/sec, while writes are sometimes dipping as low as 440MB/sec & peaks as high as 510MB/sec on occasion.

RAPID doesn't help performance, if anything, makes three out of the 5 computers that had it enabled running buggy, so disabled on those, one thing for sure, it wasn't due to lack of RAM, one of the systems has 32GB of DDR3-1600 (PC3-12800) installed. The RAPID software doesn't play well with every system, and if one's not plugged into a UPS & the power goes out, huge potential for data loss, as it's using up to 25% of available memory. Power goes out, contents of memory are forever gone on desktop PC's. Notebook users has an inbuilt UPS in a battery, if charged enough & not dead.

NVMe is the present, and in datacenters, has been for 5+ years, as far back as 2012, Linux Mint 13/Ubuntu 12.04 both had NVMe support, long before Windows 7 did. There's already technology being developed to supercede NVMe, U2 is the word I hear, may be off the money a bit, whatever takes the place of NVMe will be real RAM chips, or more of it, along with the Flash components.

While the offering in this Topic is great news, as SSD prices plunges, and SATA still has a long future, it's a matter of time before HDD's won't, except for backup drives. These uses far more energy than a SSD, runs slow as molasses, even the SATA-3 types can barely break SATA-1 specs in bursts, before nosediving. This won't happen with the Mushkin offering, except as shown in one of the charts in the article, don't understand why the initial burst, then sudden dip, but these will still satisfy many consumers......for now.

Cat
 

With respect, I think you're missing the point that @logain and others were making. You're quoting specs and features to argue that a 950 Pro is faster than an 850 EVO. No one is disputing the fact that, in an IO limited situation, the 950 Pro is the vastly superior drive. If you present both of those SSDs with a workload that stresses the drives, the 950 Pro will demolish an 850 EVO just about every time. On that note, I'm confident that we all agree.

The critical point however is that in "normal" desktop use, even for high end enthusiast users, an SSD is very rarely presented with a sustained intensive workload. SLC caches are very rarely filled, and the drives almost always have plenty of idle time to clear caches and run their internal maintenance tasks which keeps everything nice and responsive. Want proof? Just look at the host of "real world" benchmarks presented in SSD reviews here at Toms and elsewhere (things like booting, opening games/applications, installing programs, etc), with few exceptions, all SSDs tend to be separated by a % at most.

It's very similar to fast RAM. You'll see people justifying their purchase of an X99 platform with ultra fast quad channel RAM by providing benchmarks which show their RAM providing double the performance or more of a 2133mhz kit in a Z170 board... and it is. But unless you run one of the very, very few applications that benefit from RAM bandwidth, it just doesn't make any tangible difference, and most people would be better served spending their limited budgets elsewhere.

So if you regularly boot ~8 virtual machines simultaneously, or perform complex operations on a massive database, or have other similarly IO intensive workloads, for sure grab a 950 Pro and it will serve you well. It's a great drive, no question. It's just that for the vast majority of people (even enthusiasts) in the vast majority of use-cases, their money is better spent elsewhere.
 
It's all fun comparing benchmarks and "getting our nerd on" analyzing which is the fastest SSD. But the fact is, the user remains the performance bottleneck for 99+% of desktops / laptops. In-house test results:

Samsung Pro 256 GB beats a 2 TB SSHD booting to Windows ... 15.6 to 16.5 seconds
Samsung Pro 256 GB ties a 2 TB SSHD opening AutoCAD and loading an 8 MB file w/ textures ... both at 39 seconds
Samsung Pro 256 GB ties a 2 TB SSHD ... both at 45 seconds seconds opening MMO to point where character can move

Yes, we can run lots of benchmarks to show how fast the SSD is but to show a significant improvement ... that being defined as **one that impacts productivity** ... we need to do something that users just don't do even once a day ... like copy 300 GB of files. Outside of rendering, video editing and other specialized applications, it just does not impact how much work gets done. Any advantage can also be rendered moot in instances where AV program is set to examine files when opening, opening files over a network or when game server handshaking takes longer than loading textures.

We used identical laptop configuration (SSD + HD vs SSHD) and multiboot desktop (SSD versus SSHD versus HD) and had 5 users randomly assigned to use either for a period of 6 weeks in a "blind test". No one knew which configuration they were using. No one noticed any difference in performance between the 2 laptops. One user noticed a slower boot time on the desktop when BIOS was set to boot of HD but no difference in workstation or gaming performance.

Now for the user part ...

... observe some folks around the office and watch them as they boot their machines after arriving at their desks each morning. After hitting the ON button, windows is sitting there waiting for user to log in anywhere from 15 seconds to several minutes after the button pushed. In between comes taking off their jacket, listening to voice mails, checking their inbox, getting coffee, discussing the election, Monday Night Football, Big Bang Theory or the radio call-in "catch a cheater" show that they listen to on the ride into work each morning.

... handing that proposal to my secretary that I marked up while watching the Alabama football game on Saturday, she hits file / open to jump on it right away. Does it really matter if the file opens in 0.2 versus 0.4 seconds when she spends the next 3 minutes reading thru each page of the marked up document making sure she understands my corrections before setting it down and beginning to type ?

.. It's kinda like discussing muzzle velocity of a bullet in an an A versus B scenario. Unless you're a sniper taking a 1,000+ yard shot, is the fact that B is that much slower going to affect the outcome ? Is the deer at 50 yards going to jump outta the way before the bullet gets there ? Using another analogy, if they raised the speed limit on the expressway from 55 to 70 mph, I wouldn't get to the job site any faster because in rush-hour traffic, no one ever sees 40and most of the time they are not moving at all... most of the time, the puter is sitting there doing nothing waiting for user input.

So yes, being a geek with adequate disposable income, I'm always gonna get an SSD and it's going to be a performance model. But if asked if it "changed my life", or even changed my daily computing experience, I have to say "No, not in any measurable way". I have never gotten more work done, not even in the frequent 20 hour days, than I would have if I didn't have an SSD. I have never completed more quests or reached another checkpoint in a game because I had an SSD. Can I backup 500 GB of files faster with an SSD to SSD transfer ? Certainly ... does it impact me in any way ... certainly not. It's either being done while I'm sleeping or it's being done to a 2.5" portable HD that I'm taking on a business trip while I'm typing e-mails to the people I'm meeting with, packing and making travel arrangements.

So while personally I'll still continue to buy performance SSDs cause the geek fairy on my shoulder demands it, I have to say to those with budget concerns asking whether the "bargain" prices of models like this are in any way detrimental to performance, I have to say "No, not in any way that you would notice".
 


By the way:
U.2 is NVMe. U.2 is just a connector type that allows you to connect a standard form factor drive to the PCIe bus. Though XPoint is around the corner, and that'll be interesting once that really picks up speed.

 
@Jack: I think you and I (or maybe it was someone else) have had a similar discussion on another thread, so don't want to rehash old ground. But I do want to make a couple of counter-points from my experience/perspective.

First - totally agree with you on high end SSDs vs entry level units. Tangible difference is negligible outside specific (and unusual) workloads.

However, I have been in situations both corporate and personal which make SSDs justified IMHO.
1) I've been in two separate workplaces now where AV scans are scheduled to run as admin (thus my lowly user account cannot pause/postpone the scan) and where these scans bring the HDD system to their knees. 100% disk usage and 30seconds + to open Word, etc. IT tells us that scans are critical. So we basically have to walk away from our computers for 15 minutes once or twice a day, with no say about when. Bad IT practices and bad AV coding... yes on both counts. But an SSD would have solved the problem. Particularly when both companies had paid significantly more for "faster" computers by getting i7s... with dog slow HDDs in them. For the basic office tasks we needed those desktops to do, give us i3s with an SSD any day.

2) On a fresh build I agree that the difference is less, but over time with software and applications, the login times become a real frustration. I'm not talking boot to login screen, that's not a big deal, it's the time between when your desktop appears and when the PC is actually usable (because the HDD has finished hammering away loading settings and services in the background) that is a real source of frustration. From working with users, I think this is the main point that people get frustrated, complain about their slow computers and talk about upgrading to a new "faster" build. They open Chrome, or Word or whatever, and nothing happens for many, many seconds, because of IO. Now a fresh OS install would fix that, but only temporarily. With an SSD, that just never becomes an issue.

3) Finally, there is, for me at least, a frustration factor of waiting longer than I have to. I need to crop a screen shot, so I open Photoshop... I want it to open. A couple of seconds vs 10 seconds "feels" very different. I agree that in terms of the amount of work I do in a day, it's totally insignificant, but it absolutely has an impact on my mood. Maybe I should get therapy to deal with frustration/anger issues... but an SSD is cheaper! I suspect that's more an issue for me than other. But you do see people upgrading phones because app switching is too slow, and that's by far the biggest noticeable difference with a handset upgrade. I don't think it's just me!

I generally agree with your points, I just think there are occasions where SSD vs HDD does make a difference, and while they're not perhaps all that often, they're often enough, and significant enough when they do crop up, that they justify the extra $30 or so on top of a dirt cheap $40 HDD.
 


That's exactly it. The way I've been reading this thread, no one is arguing that SSDs aren't an improvement over HDDs. I think the argument here is between budget SSDs and high-end NVMe SSDs (And JackNaylorPE also brought SSHDs into the mix).

But overall, I disagree that 12 seconds feels any different than 9 seconds. However 30 seconds definitely feels frustratingly slow. There needs to be at least a 1.5x improvement in daily usage times to make the switch from an older storage medium/standard to a newer one. That's why budget SSDs are a no brainer. NVMe SSDs not so much.
 

Yes, on a second read of JackNaylor's post I think you're right. I saw the bit about only one user noticing the performance difference when booting off a HDD and thought he was arguing that the HDD -> SSD upgrade isn't really justified. I recently exchanged a few posts back and forth with a very experienced member here on the forums who was making that argument: essentially if you have enough RAM and don't often restart, then an SSD offers very little. I mistakenly thought Jack was making a similar argument and responded.

RE the 12 vs 9 second statement, I'm not sure where that's coming from? Is that in response to something I've said?
 


Sorry, didn't quote the piece I was responding to.



I was saying that 9-10 seconds vs 12-13 isn't that big a deal. It's when you compare to 30 seconds or more that frustration becomes an issue for me. Which is why NVMe SSDs don't make sense for users like me, since they offfer a very small improvement over SATA SSDs.
 


You're right in many ways, though one thing that the NVMe SSD gives to everyone is extreme fast boot times and insanely fast loading of Web pages when clicking on a link, even with 25Mbps down/2.5Mbps upload ISP speeds. Even Gen 2 SSD's of this type were/still are very fast, and now these 'gumstick' SSD's are finding their ways in ultraslim notebooks, and not all are of the SATA-3 type.

Still, SATA-3 SSD's are an excellent investment (initially fueled by a HDD 'shortage' that never was), and today, are probably the best 'bang for the buck' one can get for their overall computing experience, even on SATA-2 & some 1st gen SATA devices. In fact, it was these two (SATA-2) out of the five mentioned earlier that RAPID worked the best on, not running buggy, and in real world usage, hard to tell from SATA-3 models, even if these does use up to 25% of the 8GB RAM installed in each.

As far as this Muskin offering goes, if I had to choose between the lower rated Samsung 750 EVO & that one, I'd probably go with the Mushkin because I know that the 750 EVO are manufactured as 'entry level', and it's worth the gamble to choose the Mushkin over it. And with the 240GB model showing slightly higher speeds over the 850 EVO, makes it even more appealing to give a shot at.it's price tag of $69.99 (remember when in 2012 a 128GB Crucial m4 on promo cost $150 & had write speeds of less than SATA-2 specs?). It's really no faster, no matter which type of computer it's installed in, so left it in one of my SATA-2 notebooks.

Being that I have too many of these smaller capacity SSD's in my collection, may give the $69.99 model a shot, though my concern is the TBW more so than the warranty itself. It really needs some type of app similar to RAPID to preserve lifespan, or the end user needs a RAM Disk type app to help reduce writes. I'm really not into registry tricks for this, while some are, I've applied the tricks & on the charts once, seen no difference in disk activity & reverted back.

It's probably plenty good enough for the notebook my wife uses, would last for 10+ years. 😉

I also agree with you on consumers purchasing more hardware than they really need, for example, my EVGA GTX 1070 FTW is flat out overkill for my ASUS 1080p monitor, yet a 24" 4K UHD is my next major upgrade, so my goal there will be fulfilled. Hopefully then, my Linux OS can use the card, for now, all I get is an 'Out Of Range' floating from one corner to the other. It's no problem with Windows 10, nor 8.1 before then.

Probably didn't need a i7-4790K either, being that I had a i7-4770, and had I known that Intel used thermal paste for fluxless solder, surely would had went with the 6 core i7-5820K with nearly 2x the L3 cache & 28 PCIe lanes over 16 for $55 more, and 64GB DDR4 RAM rather than 32GB of DDR3-1600, may as well say a X99 system.:)

Uses more power (140W vs 88W), yet a lot more powerful CPU, even with a lower frequency, the L3 makes up for this easily, along with DDR4 RAM. The total cost of the build may had been $150-175 more, though surely would had been worth it.:)

Finally, my Samsung 950 PRO is less than two months old, had I known a 960 was coming, would had waited for the extra speed, and Tom's did a article on it. it's worth the extra $40 on preorder from Amazon.

See how human nature works if/when one has the cash? 😉

Cat
 


I've been following this write lifespan thing for quite a while, here and elsewhere.
I have 6 (soon to be 7) SSD's in various systems in the house. Ranging from a SATA II 128GB Sandisk to a 500GB 850 EVO and a 960GB Sandisk Ultra II.

I have not encountered a single report or question here whereby someone actually reached the warranty level on TBW, or actually wore the SSD out somewhere beyond that warranty level. 75TBW, 150TBW, whatever.
Outside of endurance tests, of course. I'm talking about regular usage.

Of course, now someone will chime in with some sort of heavy database I/O use case.

Many people are freaked out about it. They come up with all sorts of data location configurations to try to reduce that write level...but it never seems to happen.

Has anyone reading this come across such an instance?
 


Well, my 120GB Intel 520 is pretty old, I've owned it for ~2.5 years and it has changed machines twice, and I don't know how many reinstalls of Windows and Windows server. I'm also on the Insider Preview fast track for win 10 so that's another 20GB per week that I've been writing to the drive for the past year. I also use 16GB of pagefile with around 4-8GB in use on average (I tend to not close programs or reboot). Despite the abuse, it has only recorded 25TB of host writes. Intel's SSD toolbox reports expected life remaining to be 99%. So I'd assume it'll last me at least another 2 yrs.

And if you're an enthusiast and actually write that much to your SSD, you're probably also going to be swapping it out every 4-5 years. If you don't write that much you don't have nearly as much to worry about. I don't think any average/enthusiast user will surpass even the lower warrantied writes (30-40 TBW) before the warranty period runs out or they buy a new drive.

Maybe if you're running them in RAID and it's messing with some of the write optimizations you might have cause for concern? Or perhaps if you really abuse your drive with a few TB a week?
 
Older drives may have dodgy garbage collection that can look like an exhausted drive, one of my 120GB OS drives was freezing my machine, crucial think that garbage collection hasn't been allowed to work, as an OS drive it's never idle enough to work... poor design.
 


Exactly. My prev boot drive (Kingston HyperX 3k 120GB) in my main system was in there for 3.5 yrs (summer 2012), of basically 24/7 use. A total of 12.5TB host writes.
Right now, that drive is in a drawer awaiting other parts for another PC, either the c drive in the HTPC or a whole house firewall box.

As is often said here...it will be obsolete because it is too small long before it wears out from too many writes.
Total host writes and the drives wearing out is not a concern for me.
 

I'm not sure you've picked the best two areas to underscore the benefits of a high end SSD.

Boot times don't benefit whatsoever from a premium SSD: http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ssd-reviewed/4
You can see the gap between premium and mid range is pretty much non existent. There's not many results in those charts unfortunately, and I suspect you would see entry level SSDs falling behind were they there. But even then we'd be looking at maybe a matter of a few seconds.

RE web page loading, that just doesn't hit a disk hard at all. Actually launching a web browser after a system reboot causes some basic reads (I measured a tiny spike to 30% disk activity for under a second to open Chrome on my 850 Evo). Once the browser is launched, as long as you have enough RAM then anything you do is going straight from your internet connection into RAM, it's not hitting the disk at all. You can see it by monitoring your disk activity in Task Manager while browsing. If you're running out of RAM and paging to disk, then a faster disk will help, but nowhere near as much as just installing enough RAM would.

Anyway, some people have big budgets and love to have premium gear... that's fine. I only have an issue with it when they try and convince others who are working on tighter budgets to throw money at similar components which are technically faster, but offer little to no tangible benefits outside of edge cases (I'm referring to other threads here - not you by the way!)
 

I've used over 10 SSDs now between builds for myself, friends and family. Had two hardware failures requiring RMA, but never wear related.

My very first SSD, a 60GB Corsair drive which I purchased in Q1 2010 for 330AUD(!!), is still going strong in it's 4th build now I believe.

Wear issues really are totally overblown IMO.
 
I can't imagine why anyone would buy SATA 3 SSD under 1TB & find it harder to believe
anyone wouldn't go w/ the best SATA3 SSD Samsung 850 Pro &/or at least 2nd best
850 Evo SSD?
 
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