Muskin Pilot 1TB Solid State NVMe Drive Review

Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers can change depending on what hardware is being tested.  These were recorded using Sandra Professional Version 28.28.2018.11

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a freeware disk benchmarking utility that can test a variety of storage solutions from single hard drives to multi level RAID arrays and solid state disks.  The tests can be broken down to transfer sizes between 512B to 64MB with lengths between 64KB and 32GB.  Testing results are shown on a transfer chart with reads and writes clearly marked.

For our benchmark the 64MB transfer is being recorded even though the 128k range is often quoted as having the fastest transfer speed (range) of any drive.

Crystal Disk Mark is a widely available disk benchmarking program that can test a variety of different scenarios from Sequential to Random with Multiple and Single queues.

For our tests the Sequential and Random test with multiple queues and threads will be recorded.

PCMark 10 is an overall system benchmark to measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. Similar to 3DMark this new version tests the entire system as a whole using applications that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office.  This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be apparent to end users and consumers.

SYSmark 2018 is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of Productivity, Creativity and Responsiveness. The new Productivity Scenario has updated workloads and applications geared towards office centric user activities. The new Creativity Scenario which has updated workloads and applications geared toward media centric user activities and the new Responsiveness Scenario models “pain points” in the user experience when performing common activities.

The benchmarks show an interesting cross section.  On the synthetic side you can clearly see how the Mushkin Pilot walks away with the best results.  Honestly this should be no surprise given that the MX300 is a 2.5” SATA drive and the Samsung 950 Pro is only 256GB.  Typically smaller SSD are slower when it comes to overall performance due to how the controller interacts with the individual NAND chips.

I also mentioned earlier in this review that the 1TB Pilot drive was the fastest of the Mushkin Pilot NVMe drives making the pairing with the 950 Pro a bit unfair.

Of course if we look at the 970 Pro 1TB reported stats it shows read speeds up to 3500 MB/s which is right in line with the Mushkin Pilot based on our results.

The system used to test these drives is a standard LGA 2011 X-Series Kaby Lake processor which would represent a typical gaming rig.  There are aspects of a gaming system that do influence storage performance including speed of the system ram and how many cores the CPU has.  Needless to say, results can and will vary depending on your setup..