Mushkin Chronos 120GB SSD Install and Performance Specs

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I recently purchased a Mushkin Enhanced Chronos MKNSSDCR120GB 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) from Newegg.  It can be found here http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226236

WD DriveI purchased it to replace a Western Digital 1 TB WD10EACS Green Drive that will be moved into my storage pool on the Window Home Server (where it belonged in the first place).  It was also a bit slow at times.  See the stats below:

 

ATTO w WD10EACS

 

120SSdThe box with the new drive arrived this week and I couldn’t wait to get it installed on the weekend.  After installing Windows 7 Ultimate from scratch (very fast install), updating all the software (even faster) and installing all the regular apps, I ran another ATTO Disk Benchmark with amazing results.  How did I ever live with a spinning drive?  Well worth the $150 upgrade!

While this is a SATA III drive, I have it in a Motherboard (Gigabyte H55M-USB3) that only supports SATA II drives.  The results may have been even better if this drive was on a board that supported a full 6Gb/s.

 

UPDATE January 21 2012:  I added the second screen shot a week later.  Looks like the drive might get even better with age!  Results a week after the install were even higher.  Any thoughts tech community?

Day of InstallOne Week Later
ATTO w MuskinOneWeekLater

With most of the necessary software installed, I am using about 35GB of the 111GB that are available.  Not too worried about filling it up too soon and will be careful to move most of my created content to a network storage drive.

C Drive

So to free up some additional space, I moved the page file off the C Drive and onto the D Drive using the Advanced / Performance / Settings / Virtual memory settings and changed the size of the file from System managed to Custom.  I set the initial size to 8GB and the Maximum size to 8GB per my SSD advocate Rich O’Neil.

Rich also helped me with a change using the cmd powercfg –h off to turn off the space allocated for hibernation.  Now my drive looks like this:

C Drive Empty

 

I’ll never go back to a non SSD OS drive.  Speed is incredible!  From here on out, every drive gets replaces with an SSD where speed is important.