Mushkin Previews $500 4TB SSD

Megalith

Megalith

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Is there anyone who thinks this isn’t a pretty good deal?

How do you increase drive capacity further when your controller tops out at 2TB? By using JBOD. To construct a 4TB drive, Mushkin is basically putting two Reactor 2TB SSDs on a single PCB. Those drives are then joined into a JBOD with a separate controller. This dual-drive solution will function as a single volume, but spanning drives isn't without its costs. Mushkin tells us to expect random read and write performance of about 10K IOPS.
 
I think it's not a good deal.

Shitty drive.

Shitty way to get capacity.

Huge down falls.

Likely slows to a very slow crawl dealing with larger files.
 
The only place I see myself using something like this would be as a second HD for extra storage in my laptop.
 
Yakk said:
The only place I see myself using something like this would be as a second HD for extra storage in my laptop.
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I would pretty much only use a drive like this in something that's used frequently, since it's not really a reliable archive medium that can be put away for long periods of time like a rotational HDD.
 
Currently, in my primary system, I use a 256GB SSD for my OS and applications, a 512GB SSD where I install my games, and a 3TB standard HD that I put my downloads folder on and as mass storage for everything else. I also have a NAS (4 drives 6GB Raid5).

If this 4TB drive is reliable and fast enough, it could replace all of the drives in my primary system for approximately $200 more. If it was fast enough and reliable enough, I might do that in a SFF that had limited space that I really wanted extra storage in. Hmmm, no I prolly would not do that even then. I would stick with a fast but relatively small and cheap SSD, and continue to use my NAS for mass storage.

It's a cool product, I don't currently have much use for it myself, but I am sure others will.
 
pxc said:
I would pretty much only use a drive like this in something that's used frequently, since it's not really a reliable archive medium that can be put away for long periods of time like a rotational HDD.
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Agreed, that's why I thought of a laptop which gets backed up when plugged to its home network or cloud. I want a small, fast, SSD as my OS drive. And having an extra 4TB portable in a laptop would be nice actually. I'm thinking of my trusty 2012 Macbpok Pro which I'd swap out the DVD drive for a 4TB SSD for the road.

Flash storage and archiving do not mix for me!
 
I think 1TB is pretty much the sweet spot for a desktop SSD. Assuming most of us have NAS of one kind or another.
 
I'm interested, but I'd be concerned about reliability; particularly, this would make a great Steam drive for gamers, and personally, it'd be a good place to put photos and videos for editing, as neither task would be limited by IOPs.

But I'd still have a spinner doing off-hours backups.
 
i'll hold out for a true 4TB drive with better perf but this is a move in the right direction, large capacity is going to be a game changer.
 
How do current SSDs join their NAND together to form larger drives and be seen as single amount?

with 512G drives for example transcend uses 4 x 128G nand chips... Do other SSD makers not do the same thing?

10k IOPS is still far beyond what almost any "home user" needs for normal usage so the speed would be incredible for many. Even for a home lab, 10k IOPS is pretty dam fast vs maybe 1k you might get in a raid 10 pending on your work load with 4 drives..
 
/usr/sbin said:
Yeah. Me.

I only use my 4 tb drives for large file media storage. Speed of access isn't an issue. Why pay $500 when a $119 item does the job asked just as well?
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That and I really do not trust Mushkin drives. I had the 120GB mSata SSD completely fail on me twice and to wait almost 30 days the second time to get it replaced.
 
Megalith said:
How do you increase drive capacity further when your controller tops out at 2TB? By using JBOD. To construct a 4TB drive, Mushkin is basically putting two Reactor 2TB SSDs on a single PCB. Those drives are then joined into a JBOD with a separate controller.
Click to expand...

Bad idea that lowers reliability. Twice as many chips, twice as many controllers, plus an additional JBOD controller. Failure rate would likely be several times higher than their already questionable brand reliability.

How about someone building a controller that can actually control 4TB (or more) of flash memory directly, with features to increase reliability and enough redundancy to even handle a single flash chip failure. That is something I might be interested in.
 
nutzo said:
Bad idea that lowers reliability. Twice as many chips, twice as many controllers, plus an additional JBOD controller. Failure rate would likely be several times higher than their already questionable brand reliability.

How about someone building a controller that can actually control 4TB (or more) of flash memory directly, with features to increase reliability and enough redundancy to even handle a single flash chip failure. That is something I might be interested in.
Click to expand...

There is, but its expensive. Multiple connectors on a single PCIe PCB, allows you place your NAND and can be seen as a single device.
 
Am I missing something or do they (Mushkin) NOT even have just a good old 2TB drive available?

Why kill yourself trying to do this 4tb when it seems to me they could make a far bigger impact by putting out an inexpensive but solid 2TB drive. :confused:
 
I'm more interested in the 2TB model for my next SSD. I'll have to fill up my 480 I just bought first.
 
MrGuvernment said:
How do current SSDs join their NAND together to form larger drives and be seen as single amount?

with 512G drives for example transcend uses 4 x 128G nand chips... Do other SSD makers not do the same thing?

10k IOPS is still far beyond what almost any "home user" needs for normal usage so the speed would be incredible for many. Even for a home lab, 10k IOPS is pretty dam fast vs maybe 1k you might get in a raid 10 pending on your work load with 4 drives..
Click to expand...

Those chips are linked to a single controller, the controller (Silicon Motion SM2246EN) that Mushkin uses are limited to 2TB's. Mushkin put two layers of 2tb on a single PCB, 2 controllers and then a single controller to bring it together as a single drive. That's a lot of working parts. I would hope that if that JBOD chip fails you'd see at least 2TB of NAND.

One good thing is, they are using a much better controller. Glad they decided not to use the Silicon Motion SM2256. The SM2246EN is a great low end controller.
 
I'd use it for things that are not so important: Steam/Origin/UPlay games.
 
We are still 3 or so years away from 3 or 4tb SSD's that are under $200.

Even at $300 now, people would rather buy 3 x $99 3tb drives for 9tb of storage and use a cheap $65 250gb ssd as their boot drive.

Meaning, the price needs to come down where people don't think that way. 3 or 4tb for $199? Sure.
 
If reliability was good, why not? I get that standard HDD's are cheaper, etc.. But, a silent, low power, non-moving part, (reliable) SSD with high capacity would be great.

I think the biggest concern is reliability. The speed of the drive isn't that important for the high capacity drives for me, as it's storing media files and things. So, a standard spinning HDD is fine. But, I wouldn't turn down an SSD at all if the price and reliability were great. There's no reason to turn it down, really...

Glad to see things are getting better on the SSD front. May not be perfect, but it's still moving forward.
 
I'm interested in the 2TB drives for the price.

a 2TB drive makes a damn good media server in the living room if you want to store data locally instead of streaming to your TV. I would use these as a proxy of my main array to keep content local from my main storage server.


Furthermore you could have a nice backup drive that would be whisper quiet while you have spinning disks in the background.

Or vice versa.
 
If that 2TB drive is ~$250 I can see that moving a lot of units.
 
Considering the 2TB Samsung EVO is nearly $700

If you were desperate to have a big SSD this doesn't sound terrible.
 
yapchagi said:
it's been 7 months and there's no update on that 4TB SSD.
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Maybe they realized how stupid it is to market 2 jbod drives as one large drive. I mean who in their right mind would choose this over 2 2TB SSD, that you can then RAID0 or RAID1? Or just use as two separate drives without risk of loosing all the data in case one of the drives fail.
 
How about a 500 GB drive for ~$50 instead. That will sell way more units.
 
I have a 1TB SSD now and I'm constantly offloading and shuffling stuff to make space. Wish I could have a solid 4TB SSD (Samsung 950 Pro?) for about $500 because there is no way I can justify spending over $1k that it is currently priced at. Just have to wait for prices to drop I guess.

PS: Also don't understand how you guys can even use those <500GB drives.
 
Bowman15 said:
Bingo...that's all most of us need even with a few steam games.
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Even now, All I've found I need is 500GB for my main drive. My nas is humming along and provides all the extra space+redunancy I need, and I VPN into my home network to access it when Im not home. 500GB on the cheap would be perfect. For Steam games I only keep the ones I play regularly (COD, Division, GTA5 on the SSD and the older, occasionally played games are fine on a crappy old 300GB Raptor. I cant fathom keeping my entire steam library installed when it doesnt take more then 20-25 minutes to install on demand.
 
Lender said:
PS: Also don't understand how you guys can even use those <500GB drives.
Click to expand...

I have a stack of 'em; typically, and initially, I have one for the OS, but personal folders (desktop/docs/downloads) go to a spinner and all games (Steam/Origin/UPlay/Battle.net) also default to a spinner. Typically, I'll move stuff to the SSD(s), by way of folder junction dynamic links in their original places. Currently have two spinners and three SSDs installed, but could get by with two of the SSDs (250GB 950 EVO for OS and 960GB Ultra II for games/Lightroom Catalog) and one HDD if needed, and probably will in the near future by grabbing a pair of larger (but non-shingled!) spinners for a RAID-1.
 
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