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In reviewing today’s ultra thin 1.8″ SATA 3 SSD, one just has to wonder why this hasn’t caught on. The 1.8″ form factor isn’t by any means a new concept, however, it only seems logical that it should have become mainstream some time ago with the movement to ultra design. As it stands, we dug through hundreds of previously reviewed SSDs to confirm that this is the first 1.8″ SATA 3 form factor that we have ever had our hands on for analysis.
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
The Mushkin Chronos GO Deluxe 1.8″ 6Gbps SSD measures 78.5 x 54 x 5mm and weighs about 34 grams compared to the typical 2.5″ design that weighs in at 80 grams and is considerably larger. Mushkin’s website displays availability of 60, 90, 120, 180, 240 and 480GB capacities, although a quick search of the Internet is showing limited availability of the 120, 240 and 480GB capacities.
Considering the Mushkin GO Deluxe 1.8″ SSD was announced just over a month ago, we can expect availability to increase. These pictures should draw a good picture of the 1.8″ size compared to that of the mSATA and typical notebook SSDs.
Performance is ‘LSI SandForce Driven’ and typical speeds of 560MB/s read and 520MB/s write with up to 90,000 IOPS at low 4K aligned random write disk access can be expected. The device comes with a standard three year warranty and it seems only fair to shed some light on the fact that this SSD WILL NOT connect be means of a typical SATA connector. It requires a microSATA connector and the mSATA, microSATA and SATA interfaces are shown here for a better understanding:
INTERNAL COMPONENTS
The Mushkin Chronos GO Deluxe 1.8″ SSD is ‘LSI SandForce Driven and contains a SF-2281 flash storage processor along with an incredible 16 modules of SanDisk 24nm Toggle Mode NAND Flash memory. We never would have believed it possible to actually fir 16 modules of 24nm memory on such a small PCB but Mushkin has clearly done it.
Our sample is a 240GB version and actually contains 256GB of RAW memory with each module being 16GB in size. One module remains proprietary to firmware and over provisioning needs and serves the purpose of maintaining performance and endurance of the SSD. Once formatted, the storage capacity available to the user is 224GB.