Mushkin Triactor 480GB SSD Review

Shopping for a SSD can be a little confusing.  For instance do you focus on storage capacity and price or do you look at performance and pick one you like.  For the most part performance will be similar across most drives on the market with differences being between the controller and NAND selection.

In this review I looked at the Mushkin Triactor 480GB SSD.  This is a consumer level drive at a capacity I would consider good for the average home user.  Sure it is nice to have several TeraBytes at your disposal however it becomes more difficult to properly back-up your data once you get around the 1TB mark.  Personally I believe important things should be stored on a NAS system leaving your personal computer free to store games and the programs with less concern if it suffers a crash and for that you need somewhere around 500GB.

Affordability is the real advantage of the Triactor and Mushkin drives in general.  The majority of the cost savings is in how the drive is constructed.  Mushkin is using TLC NAND for this drive and while they are slower than MLC and tend to wear faster in the right configuration they can still deliver decent performance at an attractive price point.

The benchmarks in this review showed trade-off between the 480GB Triactor and the reference drive.  Sandra reads were much faster, Crystal Disk Mark random performance was faster and ATTO Disk was noticeably slower with writes.  These three benchmarks test three different aspects of the SSD and depending on your usage can change the performance level.

Real world benchmark numbers tell a different story in favor of the reference drive which I attribute to a more consistent ATTO curve and larger capacity drive however the gains do coincide with the Crystal Disk Mark random scores indicating there is a correlation.

SLC Drive Cache
SATA 6 Compliant
More Storage Less Cost

Limited Capacity