Mushkin Source SATA SSD Review (500GB): A Cheap Upgrade

REAL WORLD FILE TRANSFER

We also wanted to see how performance was in a real-world use when transferring large files to the SSD. For this test, we are going to simply stress write performance by transferring over a 30GB folder of movies off of a 250GB Samsung 960 EVO to the test SSDs and time how long it takes. Once complete we can calculate the average speed.

The Mushkin Source delivered an average bandwidth of 503MB/s in our 30GB transfer test. This is a very good result that ranks it ahead of most other SSDs in its class. You can even see that while it was outperformed by the UV400 and nearly tied with the TR200 in PCMark 8, its SLC cache provides a significant write speed advantage in moving large files.

POWER CONSUMPTION

For our power consumption testing, we have the drive connected to the system as a secondary drive. To record the wattage, we are now utilizing a Quarch Technology Programmable Power Module. It allows us to accurately measure power consumption over time and is flexible enough to allow us to test any SSD that comes our way.

Our power analysis may change as time goes on, but for now, we are looking at just a few metrics with the main goal of measuring our results against the manufacturer’s ratings. Because most consumer systems are at idle for about 80% of the time, idle power consumption is an important measure to look at when understanding the efficiency of a drive.

In the chart above we have the average power consumption of each drive we test at idle, with Link Power Management and low power mode enabled in Windows. The Mushkin Source has a rated idle power consumption rate of 0.08W. In our tests, we can see the 500GB model consumes even less, just 0.29W, or 29mW.

POWER EFFICIENCY

Finally, we wanted to post up a graph of the power efficiency of the SSDs in write transfers. We are looking at MB/s per Watt in this graph. The higher the result, the better.

Looking at efficiency, the Mushkin Source takes the top spot on our chart. DRAMless SSDs consume less power because they don’t need to constantly feed it to DRAM, making them inherently more efficient off the bat. With the inclusion of Micron’s 64L 3D TLC, the Mushkin Source brings efficiency to new heights and averages 341MB/s per Watt.