INTRODUCTION

   To this date largely thanks to the several price drops which have occurred over the course of the past 2 years more and more consumers choose to equip their systems with SATA III SSD models in order to experience superior read & write performance compared to regular mechanical drives. However although for casual users, gamers, overclockers and most professionals the performance of SATA III SSDs is probably more than what they'll ever need the same doesn't apply for certain people (and companies) who place performance above all else. For such audiences several manufacturers started producing PCI-E based SSDs as far back as 7 years ago (if memory serves me well the first manufacturer to attempt this was Fusion-io with their io-Drive) but up until this day prices were not what most people would call affordable. Today with us we have one of the most cost-effective PCI-E SSDs in the market, the Scorpion 480GB by Mushkin.

   For nearly 20 years, Mushkin has been dedicated to helping overclockers, gamers, IT managers, digital artists and mobile professionals enhance their computing experience by providing reliable, high-performance products. Mushkin products include a line of Flash Memory-based products and complete selection of memory upgrades for desktops, notebooks and servers. Since the company’s founding in 1994, Mushkin has received numerous awards and commendations for quality, reliability and technical excellence.

   Compared to regular SATA SSD models PCI-E models use the extra firepower offered by your PCI Express slot which thanks to multi-lane scalability can reach speeds many times over those achieved by the well-established SATA III standard. Going back to the product at hand the Scorpion 480GB model which we have here with us today is basically two M.2 240GB SATA III SSDs (support both TRIM & NCQ) mounted onto a PCI-E 2.0 x2 card and configured in RAID0 mode with the help of the 88SE9230 Marvell RAID controller (this controller also supports RAID 0/1/10). The M.2 240GB SATA III SSDs feature two LSI SandForce SF-2281 controllers (one each) paired with 8 Micron 19nm MLC NAND flash memory modules. This combination allows the Scorpion 480GB PCI-E X2 SSD to achieve up to 100.000 4K read/write input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 925/800MB/s sequential read/write with an somewhat impressive MTBF of 1 million hours. These all look great on paper (although less great compared to the more x4/x8 high-end models) but the time has come to see how the Scorpion 480GB PCI-E X2 SSD by Mushkin does for real.