Overall and Final Verdict
So at the end of the day, how does the Striker come out? Well in our performance testing I was impressed with the Strikers performance in nearly every case. There was that weird File Server benchmark in Passmark as well as the dated OCZ drives out performing when testing at 4k QD32. That said when doing pure sequential testing the Striker is still up above everything else tested to date and it is pushing up close to the performance limits of SATA3 as a whole.
Beyond the performance numbers, I would prefer to see Mushkin running their flagship drive in a nicer case as well. The steel case with no screws isn’t bad and gets the job done, but with flagship drives it is nice to get something a little more special. Speaking of, the 3 year warranty is a little low when compared to drives from the competition like the Corsair Neutron XT it is a little low. Using the new Phison S10 controller did bring in additional features like the End to End data path protection that helps prevent corrupted data before it is hardened on the NAND. Last but not least there is something you don’t really consider about Mushkin much, but they actually design and manufacture their drives in the US. So if you are big on promoting Made in America, that is very rare thing with computer hardware!
SO is this the drive for you? Actually I think this is a great pick. The performance is solid and if you look at the pricing currently it is sitting on the low side of pricing for a 480GB drive. The drives that are priced lower are all slower drives by a large margin making this a good buy if you are in the market for a large capacity SSD. At 480 GB if you don’t go crazy you could get your OS, all of your standard programs, and all of your normally played games all on the drive with room to spare.