Mushkin Atlas 480GB SSD Review – Performance Meets Capacity In The Ultra World

Our SSD analysis today is another first for us here at TSSDR as we have finally received a Mushkin Atlas 480GB mSATA SSD, the reigning champion in capacity for mSATA drives at this point and time.

The interest we have seen in this drive, particularly pertaining to it’s height, has been somewhat of a shock as several e-mails have been received asking if we thought it would fit in such and such a laptop or ultrabook.

To answer two of our e-mails, we installed the Atlas 480GB in our Toshiba Z830, and also, a Samsung Series 9, and had no problem with fit whatsoever.  In fact, even we were surprised that there was so little height variation between the two.

As a direct comparison, we tried to demonstrate the difference between the Mushkin Atlas 240GB mSATA SSD and the 480GB version which contains two PCBs, more commonly known as a mother and daughter board.  The regular Atlas measures 3mm in height while the Atlas 480GB mSATA SSD measures 5mm.  Our opinion is that this mSATA SSD will fit into any system without difficulty.

MUSHKIN ATLAS 480GB SSD

The Mushkin Atlas 480GB SSD is a SATA 3 (6Gbps) mSATA solid state drive that is only one third the size of a business card and weighs approximately 10gm.  It’s specifications list it as 50.8mm long, 29.85 mm wide and 5.4mm thick.  We checked ours closely and it is 5mm max.  It is backwards compatible to SATA 2, has full TRIM support and a three year warranty.

Performance specifications for this SSD are listed at 540MB/s read and 428MB/s write transfer speeds with up to 78,000 IOPS at low 4k aligned random write disk access.  Power consumption is listed at 1W idle and 3W active.

COMPONENTS

The 480GB Atlas contains two printed circuit boards, commonly termed as a mother and daughter board.  One sits atop the other and both are held in place by three connectors. The motherboard contains a LSI SandForce SF-2281 SATA 3 flash storage processor and, in total, there are eight modules of flash memory on both boards.

Micron 25nm 64GB MLC asynchronous NAND flash memory (MT29F512G08CUAAAC5) provides a total of 512GB RAW memory, however, 32GB remains proprietary to LSI SandForce over provisioning and firmware needs.

Once formatted, the Atlas 480GB SSD has a total of 447GB available to the user for storage.  This photograph is an excellent depiction of how the top daughter board folds over and where the three connectors hold it in place.

These pictures display the SSD as it appears on the front and back, once assembled.