INTRODUCTION

   Even though as we've pointed out numerous times in the past 2.5" SATA III solid state drives are still leading the market in terms of sales (mainly due to compatibility with older systems) M.2 drives seem to be catching up. Of course, this jump in sales wouldn't be possible if not for the introduction of NVMe technology (NVM Express) which propelled M.2 performance to impressive new heights (up to around 3500MB/s for PCIe 3.0/Gen3 and 5000MB/s for PCIe 4.0/Gen4 SSD models). Because of that most manufacturers have focused their resources in the development of NVMe drives and honestly there seems to be no end in sight (competition between manufacturers however is always a good thing for the end consumer). Mushkin "enriched" their M.2 SSD lines with the Helix-L and the Pilot-E models a few months back and having already reviewed the former (review here) the time has come for us to check the latter.

   For over 25 years, Mushkin has been dedicated to helping gamers, digital artists, IT managers and professionals alike enhance their computing experience by providing reliable, high-performance products. Mushkin’s products include a complete selection of USB, SSD and memory module upgrades for both the consumer and enterprise industries. Since the company’s founding in 1994, Mushkin has received numerous awards and commendations for quality, reliability, and technical excellence.

   Just like the Kingston KC2000 M.2 NVMe SSD which we reviewed a while back (review here) under the hood of the Mushkin Pilot-E we find the SM2262EN 8-channel NAND flash controller by Silicon Motion paired with Micron's 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash modules and a single 512MB LPDDR3 SDRAM module again by Micron (this configuration allows the 500GB model of the Pilot-E to reach numbers of up to 3500MB/s in reads and 2300MB/s in writes). Again the SM2262EN 8-channel NAND flash controller packs several features and technologies including Silicon Motion’s proprietary NANDXtend error-correcting code (ECC), datapath protection, end to end data protection with SRAM ECC, S.M.A.R.T, TRIM, NCQ, thermal-throttling, active garbage collection, DevSleep (device sleep), LDPC (Low Density Parity Check), SLC write acceleration (algorithms for optimal sustained performance), AES-256bit hardware encryption and of course fully supports TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 (full compatibility with Microsoft's eDrive and EU's GDPR). As for endurance Mushkin reports an MTBF (mean time between failures) of up to 1.5 million hours and TBW (total bytes written) numbers of up to 350TB for the 500GB model, 650TB for the 1TB model and 1300TB for the 2TB model (Mushkin covers the entire line by a 3-year limited warranty).