Mushkin Releases New Striker SSD, Displays an Upcoming M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD

Mushkin had a couple of new and upcoming products in its suite during CES. The first one is a new Striker SSD, which uses Phison’s S10 controller coupled with Micron’s 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND. We already took a look at the Phison S10 controller in Corsair’s Neutron XT and while it didn’t set any new records, it was a decent middle-class controller. My biggest criticism about the Neutron XT was the price, but I’m confident that Mushkin’s Striker will be more competitive thanks to more cost efficient NAND and typically Mushkin has been one of the value players. 

Availability will be in Q1’15, so expect to find the Striker on the shelves in the next two months or so. Pricing is to be announced.

Mushkin also had the 1TB Reactor on display. It’s an SM2246EN based drive with Micron’s 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND and what makes it truly interesting is its $360 price tag (that’s $0.36 per GB!). I got a sample right before the holidays and have been testing it since I got back from CES, so stay tuned for an in-depth review within the next couple of weeks.

Moving on to very interesting upcoming products, Mushkin showed off the Hyperion PCIe SSD. It’s based on Phison’s E7 controller, which is a PCIe 3.0 x4 design with NVMe support. Performance is up to 2.8GB/s for reads and 1.2GB/s for writes and random performance is also very competitive at over 300K IOPS. The controller is still in development and so far there hasn’t even been a live demo yet, but I was told that the Hyperion should hit the market during the first half of this year. 

For current generation PCIe, Mushkin was showing the XC PCIe drive. Like the most PCIe drives on the market today, the XC is simply four SandForce SF-2281 controller in RAID 0 and as you can see, the drive consists of two modules with each having two daughterboards (i.e. one PCB per controller).

Mushkin also has a version with four SM2246EN controllers in development. The Silicon Motion controller will enable consistent performance with all data types and in addition it supports up to 1TB per controller, hence upping the maximum capacity to 4TB.

And like everyone else, Mushkin had an SF3700 prototype on display. Mushkin will be ready to release a drive as soon as Seagate/SandForce is ready with the controller and firmware, which should be in early Q3’15 from what I have heard.

And no lineup is complete without some DDR4. The DIMMs Mushkin had on display were DDR4-2133 and DDR4-2400, which to be honest is nothing exciting but Mushkin has always been more of a value brand instead of being the first choice of overclockers.

ADATA CES Suite Tour: PCIe & TLC SSDs, Power-Loss Protection Demo, 256GB SD Cards, USB 3.1 And More

I stopped by ADATA’s suite last week to see what the company has been up to in the past six months. While ADATA didn’t release or announce anything new at the show, there were plenty of upcoming products on display in the suite.

The SP320 will be ADATA’s first TLC NAND based SSD and will be available sometime in the first half of 2015. It’s based on Silicon Motion’s new SM2256 controller, which supports LDPC error correction that increases the endurance (basically, LDPC can deal with a lot higher error rate compared to traditional BCH error correction). Capacities will range from 120GB to all the way to up to 960GB, but the exact specifications are unknown at this point.

Moving on to PCIe, ADATA was showcasing industrial SSDs based on JMicron’s JMF811 and JMF810 controllers. The JMF811 is the full-fledged version with four PCIe 2.0 lanes, whereas the JMF810 is capped to two lanes. Capacities go up to 1TB in M.2 2280 form factor and I was told that the drive is already shipping to ADATA’s industrial partners. Obviously, the drive is not a retail version (hence the awkward name), but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a client version with the same controller showing up later.

Similar to Computex, ADATA was also demoing the SandForce SF3700 based SR1020. To be honest, I don’t really have anything new to share on the SF3700. The live demo ADATA was showing in the suite was just sequential writes, which we have already seen before for a few times. Timing wise Seagate/SandForce is now aiming for Computex 2015, so expect to see a ton of new SSD announcements and releases around June time.

In addition to products, ADATA was showing a neat power-loss protection test platform. The platform consists of a custom PCB that plugs into a USB port along with a special software that interrupts power delivery. The purpose of the demo was to show off ADATA’s enterprise SR1010 SSD with full power-loss protection, but ADATA also promised to send us the test platform for use in future reviews.

ADATA was also showcasing a couple of USB 3.0 drives with unique security features. The first one was the UE720, which is otherwise a typical USB 3.0 drive but features a fingerprint scanner to provide an extra layer of security.

The other one was the UC520, which uses Bluetooth 4.0 for security. I’m not sure how exactly the encryption works with Bluetooth, but I assume the drive needs to create a Bluetooth connection with a known computer/tablet/smartphone before the contents can be accessed.

For SD cards ADATA has a new UHS-II type XPG SDXC card with capacity of up to 256GB. The card offers read speeds of up to 150MB/s and is capable of 4K2K recording. 

ADATA was also displaying a USB 3.1 compatible SE700 external drive with dual SSDs inside. Sequential performance goes above 800MB/s and the drive will be ready to ship once USB 3.1 platforms are available later this year.

ADATA was one of Intel’s original DDR4 launch partners and since the launch ADATA has been able to up the speeds to DDR4-3333.