Mushkin Chronos DX 480GB SSD Review

Anvil Storage Utilities

Version and / or Patch Used: RC5

So what is Anvil Storage Utilities? First of all, it's a storage benchmark for SSDs and HDDs where you can check and monitor your performance. The Standard Storage Benchmark performs a series of tests, you can run a full test or just the read or the write test or you can run a single test, i.e. 4K DQ16.

Anvil Storage Utilities is not officially available yet but we've been playing with the beta for several months now. The author, Anvil on several international forums has been updating the software steadily and is adding new features every couple of months.

The software is used several different ways and to show different aspects for each drive. We've chosen to use this software to show the performance of a drive with two different data sets. The first is with compressible data and the second data set is incompressible data. Several users have requested this data in our SSD reviews.

Fill Compressible Data

Incompressible Data

Here we see a few key issues with the Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 480GB. The first is the lower 4K performance on the 480GB capacity size. The SandForce architecture doesn't use a DRAM buffer to store table data so that information comes from the NAND and internal buffers. 480GB of space is a lot of information to keep track of.

The second issue is the incompressible data performance. This is an area where SandForce based SSDs are slower than others on the market.

Scaling Read IOPS through Queue Depth

Here we see a list of random read 4K IOPS performance as measured in Anvil. Companies like to talk about their high IOPS performance, but those only come at high queue depths. Desktop users rarely hit high queue depths so lower IOPS rating are what should be looked at when comparing daily use performance. The Mushkin Chronos DX 480GB does very well in the QD1, QD2 and QD4 test, even against the new OCZ Vector 512GB.

Scaling Write IOPS through Queue Depth

The Mushkin Chronos DX 480GB is significantly slower than the other drives in the chart when writing 4K data.