Mushkin @ CES 2012

In between my meeting with Trendnet and Intel I took the tram from the Mirage over to TI to visit the guys from Mushkin. They invited me up to show off what they have planning for 2012. Little did I know how exciting they were! This is where I ended up finding the product I am most excited for from CES this year. 

It wouldn’t be 2012 if Mushkin wasn’t showing off a few sets of quad channel ram for the X79 chipsets.

We even saw their upcoming mSATA SSD’s titled Atlas

SD cards

1.8 and 2.5 inch SSD’s  with read and write speeds of up to 560MS/s and 525 MB/s, exciting but still not what got my blood going on my visit

USB 3.0 flash drives

What I found so exciting was Mushkin’s design for a PCI Express SSD called the Mushkin Scorpion. Most manufactures have been doing the same ol thing over and over again. Mushkin’s design will allow for a lot more flexibility. How will they do that? Everything is modular! The design has the controller on the PCI card itself with four plugs for your NAND. The drive handles these plugs like a RAID controller would mean you can configure them with redundancy or for pure speed.  Where this drive is going to stand out is when you look at expanding in the future. If you decide later that 64 gigs of space isn’t enough for you, you can just pick up another NAND stick. There is no need for you to throw away all of the original money invested in the drive to go out and buy another drive with a higher capacity. Another cool aspect to this is what if a newer faster controller comes out in the future, you can buy a new controller card without having to throw away all of the money you have invested in capacity! In my opinion this is the coolest thing I saw at CES this year. Mushkin is planning on pricing this competitively and if it gets enough traction this could be the future of high speed storage. They are planning capacities of 240, 480, and 960 and it will be rated up to 1275MB/s sequential read, 1500MB/s sequential write, and 120,000 4K random write IOPS.