Final Thoughts
Mushkin’s GAMMA drive fits right in with all of the other top-tier Gen4 solid state drives on the market right now. Offering some of the fastest speeds we’ve seen in a solid state drive! In CrystalDiskMark we saw speeds of 7017.47 MB/s read and 6722.91 MB/s write. Likewise in ATTO we saw max speeds of 6650 MB/s read and 6310 MB/s write. These scores are very impressive and definitely an improvement over the first round of Gen4 drives that we saw which basically maxed out around 5000 MB/s. This performance has a lot to do with the Phison PS5018-E18 controller which is going to be used a lot over the next couple of years.
Now we did notice some thermal throttling on this drive. The drive does not come with any type of cooling so we tested it as such. While most of our tests ran fine in ATTO Disk Benchmark we noticed about 50% through the test the drive performance started to fall off. We then re-tested with the M.2 heatsink and the results were more on-par with the advertised speeds. It is safe to say that most people will have M.2 heatsinks on their motherboard, but if you don’t you’ll likely run into throttling issues on longer writes with this drive.
With no software, no cooling solution and minimal packaging Mushkin is able to offer the GAMMA at a pretty aggressive price. Right now the 2TB version is selling at our favorite online retailer for $389.99, which is $70 cheaper than the Patriot Viper VP4300. Mushkin is also backing the drive with a 5-year warranty. I think that if you don’t really need software or included cooling this is a great drive. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Mushkin GAMMA 2TB Gen4 Solid State Drive a 9 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Great overall performance
– Price
– 5-year warranty
Cons:
– Noticed some thermal throttling (no heatsink included)
– No software / SSD toolbox
