This year at CES Mushkin introduced their upcoming lane of SSDs called the Striker. Up until now, most of their SSDs have been in the Chronos product line. A change in name along with performance improvements are welcomed. The Striker series of SSDs run a quad core 8 channel Phison controller with Micron's 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND. In the case of our sample, it has an impressive 480GBs of storage. They suggest that the drive will have read speeds up to 565MB/sec and write speeds up to 550MB/sec so today I am going to put it through our benchmark suite and find out if that is really the case. Before then though I am also going to dig inside and see what is inside as well. Enjoy!

Product Name: Mushkin Striker 480GB

Review Sample Provided by: Mushkin

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Packaging

The packaging for the Mushkin Striker is extremely simple. The drive comes in a blister pack with the easy to open and close locks up on top. Inside behind the drive is a single paper with the background for the front on one side and on the back There is a photo of the drive with a couple small features highlighted. I would much prefer to see a specification on the packaging myself though. On the front the background matches the sticker on the drive itself with a red and black design. Then of course the drive sits right in front where you can see the entire thing.

Our Testing Procedures and Test Rig

Pictures and Breakdown

The exterior of the Striker really doesn’t have to much going on. Mushkin went with a rough black powdercoat finish. It has a lot of texture, more than the aluminum cases especially. On top we have the red, black, and grey design on the product sticker. Along with that you get all of the other information here as well. For starters it has the capacity, but beyond that you also have the model number and serial number, a note that this is a SATA3 drive, and then all of the required logos like the RoHS and FCC logos. The drive itself is a standard 2.5 inch drive and it is a thin drive with its 7mm thickness. That means this will work in Ultrabooks that support the 7mm 2.5 inch form factor.

Nothing special going on here. Just the standard power and SATA3 data connection.

The back of the drive is a little interesting. You have mounting holes to mount the Striker from the bottom or the sides of the drive. What you won’t find on the sides or the bottom though are any screws holding the casing together. Mushkin actually snap fit the drive together. Oddly enough there wasn’t a void if opened sticker on this drive for me to damage when I went to get inside.

To get inside I used a small flathead screwdriver to slip into a few of the gaps and pop the two pieces apart. When I got inside, I was surprised to find out that even inside they didn’t use any screws. The PCB actually snaps or slides right into the casing and locks into place. Using the same technique that I used to get into the drive I was able to pop it right out as well.

With the PCB pulled out we finally get a little better look at what is going on inside the Striker. For starters in the middle we have the Phison PS3110-S10 controller. This is a 32 bit quad core controller with eight channels. Next to the controller we have a 256MB Nanya NT5CC256M16CP-D1 DDR3-1600 SDRAM chip that is used for caching. For NAND they went with Micron's 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND. There are four NAND on each side giving them a capacity of 60GB each to reach our 480 overall capacity. All of that is on a blue PCB with metal all along the left and right sides to ground to the case.

Performance

Next, I ran the Striker through our SSD benchmark suite and while doing that I also made a few adjustments to our testing. To start things off though I benchmarked the Striker in CrystalDiskMark both on the read and write. On the read performance, the Striker came in close but just slightly above the Corsair Force LX drive that I recently covered. This puts the Striker up at the top of our charts in the Sequential read performance with a read speed of 547.1. Unlike the Force LX though when it comes to write performance the Striker dominated with a write speed of 530.8. The write speed at 4k with a queue depth of 32 is slightly lower than the OCZ drives, but was still respectable.

Next I ran through the AS SSD Copy Benchmark that copies files simulating a few different situations that you will run into in real life. These results are displayed in the time it took to copy the file so the lower the number the better. As we can see The Striker was near the top of the charts in the game benchmark with the Corsair drive edging out just slightly. In the program test the Striker does have the fastest time and the same can be said with the ISO test as well with a considerably faster time on that one than anything else tested.

Next using Passmark I use the benchmark programs advanced disk benchmark. Here we run four tests that simulate four different usage situations. Here the web server benchmark was right at the top of the charts with the OCZ drives. But the file server test took a big hi and was much lower than most of the other drives. Here we can see that the Striker isn’t perfect and has its own weakness’s.

For real world testing, I ran the Striker through the extremely long PCMark 8 benchmark. We have been using the overall score to compare drives but I will admit that it looks like we might have to rethink that decision given how close each of these three drives are in the results.

So the big change I made to our SSD testing I removed IOMeter as it is an older unsupported benchmark and replaced it with Anvil’s Storage Utilities. I am still using this test to see IOPS though. I set the benchmark to a Compression setting of 46% to find middle ground. I use the 4K QD16 result on both read and write as well. So the Striker comes in at the top by a large margin on the read performance but for write performance it is down below the Force LX. Ironically this is the same Force LX that has really poor write performance in sequential benchmarks lol.

Overall and Final Verdict

So at the end of the day, how does the Striker come out? Well in our performance testing I was impressed with the Strikers performance in nearly every case. There was that weird File Server benchmark in Passmark as well as the dated OCZ drives out performing when testing at 4k QD32. That said when doing pure sequential testing the Striker is still up above everything else tested to date and it is pushing up close to the performance limits of SATA3 as a whole.

Beyond the performance numbers, I would prefer to see Mushkin running their flagship drive in a nicer case as well. The steel case with no screws isn’t bad and gets the job done, but with flagship drives it is nice to get something a little more special. Speaking of, the 3 year warranty is a little low when compared to drives from the competition like the Corsair Neutron XT it is a little low. Using the new Phison S10 controller did bring in additional features like the End to End data path protection that helps prevent corrupted data before it is hardened on the NAND. Last but not least there is something you don’t really consider about Mushkin much, but they actually design and manufacture their drives in the US. So if you are big on promoting Made in America, that is very rare thing with computer hardware!

SO is this the drive for you? Actually I think this is a great pick. The performance is solid and if you look at the pricing currently it is sitting on the low side of pricing for a 480GB drive. The drives that are priced lower are all slower drives by a large margin making this a good buy if you are in the market for a large capacity SSD. At 480 GB if you don’t go crazy you could get your OS, all of your standard programs, and all of your normally played games all on the drive with room to spare.

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.