Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Mushkin REACTOR 1TB Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) 2.5 Inch SATA III 6Gb/s MLC 7mm MKNSSDRE1TB,Black

Top positive review

FAST, RELIABLE, GREAT PURCHASE

Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2017

When one of our laptops began getting drive errors, it was clear we were on borrowed time. After looking around at the options, I decided that an SSD was the way to go, both for speed and reliability, but also to add some additional life to an older Lenovo laptop. I read a lot of the reviews on Amazon, but quickly found that just about every SSD had great reviews. Tech comparison tests weren't that much help either, since even the slowest SSD beats the daylights out of a fastest HDD. So, I ultimately turned to a UserBenchmark site and studied the SSDs for performance and price. The Mushkin Reactor looked to me to be the best combo of performance on a budget; using the latest MLC flash memory and a high-quality controller.

This computer runs my wife's business and the HDD had failed with barely a whimper. Every computer comes apart a little differently, but for me the installation went very quickly and smoothly. The Lenovo Z575 laptop recognized the drive immediately and I set about to making a clean install of Windows and restoring her files from the network backup drive. After about 5 months of daily operation (so far), everything works great. The computer starts up so much faster with the SSD, and it runs quite a lot longer on the battery. Neither of us is a high-power user, and there may be better drives for gaming or workstation use. For our needs though, this was a great purchase. Happy wife, happy life!

Top critical review

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Amazon Customer

DOA

Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2018

Disk is completely unrecognized in bios connected to SATA. Dropped it in a external enclosure, and the enclosure is recognized but disk is not. Since i wasn't ready to migrate my machine as soon as I got the disk i'm now more than 30 days for returns. I guess i paid $200 for a paper weight!

sudo fdisk /dev/sdc

Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.31.1).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.

fdisk: cannot open /dev/sdc: No such file or directory

sudo smartctl -a -T permissive /dev/sdc
smartctl 6.6 2016-05-31 r4324 [x86_64-linux-4.15.0-33-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke,

Read Device Identity failed: scsi error medium or hardware error (serious)

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: [No Information Found]
Serial Number: [No Information Found]
Firmware Version: [No Information Found]
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: [No Information Found]
Local Time is: Sun Sep 2 12:45:01 2018 PDT
SMART support is: Ambiguous - ATA IDENTIFY DEVICE words 82-83 don't show if SMART supported.
SMART support is: Ambiguous - ATA IDENTIFY DEVICE words 85-87 don't show if SMART is enabled.
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 70 00 04 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 44 81 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

ATA device, with non-removable media
Standards:
Likely used: 1
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 0 0
heads 0 0
sectors/track 0 0
--
Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
device size with M = 1024*1024: 0 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 0 MBytes
cache/buffer size = unknown
Capabilities:
IORDY not likely
Cannot perform double-word IO
R/W multiple sector transfer: not supported
DMA: not supported
PIO: pio0

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From the United States

Saintsea

FAST, RELIABLE, GREAT PURCHASE

Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2017

Verified Purchase

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B. Bordelon

and so far it's working beautifully - and it's SO much faster than my factory ...

Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2016

Verified Purchase

After reading lots and lots of reviews, I chose to go with Mushkin brand. Made in USA, reliable (based on reviews), and very well priced. I used this in a mid-2011 iMac to replace a failing hard disk, and so far it's working beautifully - and it's SO much faster than my factory HD. I do windows software development, and previously had to use bootcamp in order to get decent performance, but since putting this in I've been booting into Windows (10) using just Parallels, and the performance is better than bootcamp was with the factory HD.

Here's a list of the items I uses, as well as the tutorial I followed...

Items used:
1. Newer Technology AdaptaDrive 2.5" to 3.5" Drive Converter Bracket.
2. Jackly 45-in-One Mobile Phone Screwdriver Set (JK-6089) (JK6089-C)
3. A 2.5 in, 7mm thick SSD (I used Mushkin MKNSSDRE1TB Reactor 1TB SATA III 6Gb 2.5inch SSD )
4. This cable (so the fans in the 2011 iMac won't run at full speed all the time): OWC In-line Digital Thermal Sensor for iMac 2011 Hard Drive Upgrade
5. I used an old credit card with one short edge "sharpened" to get the glass off, but you could purchase suction cups like Heavy Duty Suction Cup for Mac Screen Repair or similar. Some people just use guitar picks.
6. Spudger or some type of plastic or wood tool to unplug the very small cables. I already had a set of dental picks I used.

Tutorial: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2429+Hard+Drive+Replacement/7555

4 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

DOA

Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2018

Verified Purchase

2 people found this helpful

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Rich

Very very good SSD

Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2015

Verified Purchase

Friend of mine handed me a credit card and said build me a new gaming rig. I was planning on using a Samsung drive because I have a 830 pro and it’s been flawless the last 3 years.
But with all the problems popping up about the 840 series having the slow down bug, and the firmware issues people are having with the 850 series it scared me. I have a Crucial M500 but I was not all that impressed with reviews on the new Crucial MX & BX series. The Sandisk SSD’s sounded like a good option but I decided to go with the Mushkin Reactor.
Now that I have the machine all finished I have been able to test the Reactor SSD out.
EXCELLENT, once I made the normal SSD tweaks to Windows 7 like turning off the Search service and tweaks to disable PreFetching and Superfetch the Mushkin Reactor is pulling between 530-545 meg reads and 435-465 writes depending on the benchmark program you use.
Mushkin’s Reactor is priced very nice for a 1 TB drive, the controller is older but its solid. Note there is no software for the Reactor, Samsung has their Magician and Intel has their optimizer tool but Mushkin has nothing so you will have to tweak your OS manually to get the most out of it.
I guess the best way to describe the Reactor is that it’s not a flashy drive that has big marketing behind it, in fact it comes in a plain plastic clamshell with a Mushkin paper inlay. The drive uses tried and tested components that are not the absolute fastest thing out there but more than fast enough to be in the same class as the top end drives but it’s cheaper and it just works.
This part is just for reference for those in the market to upgrade or just curious. This new machine is built around a Intel I7-4790k(not OC’d), MSI Z97 Gaming 7 motherboard ,MSI GTX 970 videocard ,Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB DDR3 1600mhz. Testing the machine with some basic benchmarks shows that the new machine is almost 25% faster than my 4.4ghz overclocked 2600k I built in Dec 2011.
For my next machine that I build for myself I will seriously look at what Mushkin has on the market.
The Reactor is overall just a very good solid SSD that I will recommend to my friends.
I hope review\comment helps someone out there.

152 people found this helpful

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Xavier Mackie

Premium Performance Compensates for Cheap Design

Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2017

Verified Purchase

I bought this because I'm building my first PC and needed an upgrade from the slow-as-molasses SSHD I'd been using up this point. I typically only buy Samsung SSDs as they tend to be the best SSDs all around in terms of build quality and performance, but I sprung for this SSD for my build instead because I seriously needed one and didn't think a "premium" Samsung SSD was necessary, and it looks like a made the right decision with this one.

First and foremost, this is not a "premium" SSD in most regards. The casing is made of a cheap and very light plastic and the packaging that it came in is even cheaper still. There is no box, no anti-static bagging, just a cheap clear plastic case. There is no SSD toolbox to download, as Mushkin hasn't gotten around to making their own software for their SSDs. All in all, everything about the SSD itself feels cheap, but seeing as how I'm probably never going to touch/see it again and it's going to be in a big steel tower sitting behind cables and surrounded by RGB lights anyway, it doesn't really matter. But still, presentation matters, is all I'm saying.

Anyway, the performance, AKA the actual reason I got this thing, is where it shines. After a 3-hour migration process from my old SSHD and another 10 minute installation to swap it in, the boot from my old SSHD and this SSD is like night and day. The time from bootscreen to desktop with this SSD was around 8 seconds, and time to usability (after all of my programs started up, i.e. Steam, Discord, Spotify, PIA, Mailbird, Razer Synapse, and Plex just to name a few) was about another 4 or 5 seconds, based on my calculation. In other words, my boot-up time dropped by about (I'm not kidding) 90%, which is about what you'd expect when migrating from any HDD, not to mention the fact everything from launching applications to loading in games (one of the primary reasons a gamer would want an SSD) is significantly faster now.

I'm not gonna bog this review down mentioning things like read/write speeds, because I don't believe the average consumer is going to notice the difference. Just know that an SSD is the easiest upgrade you can ever get for your computer, and af you want or "need" a premium, top of the line SSD and you've got the money to burn, then go buy a Samsung PRO or EVO. For everyone else, the Mushkin REACTOR will not do you wrong.

3 people found this helpful

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Tony

Living the dream at last!

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2016

Verified Purchase

I bought this for my PS4 after long years of fantasizing about replacing the sluggish stock 5400 RPM HDD with a big SSD. Obviously the limiting factor for a long time was cost per GB: when the PS4 came out, 1TB SSDs were priced out of reach for most mere mortals (~$1000). Happily, that's no longer the case. SSD prices have absolutely cratered in the last year or so, and the $230 or so that this drive costs is an absolute steal for anyone who's been following SSD prices for a while.

There are lots of forum posts and benchmarks claiming that an SSD isn't worth it in a PS4 because the PS4's aging SATA II drive interface can't take full advantage of an SSD's blistering speeds.

I'd like to push back on this claim on two fronts. One, SSDs are now affordable enough that the cost-per-GB argument is now little more than a way to justify one's own reluctance to spend money. It's the classic psychological tactic of devaluing something to hide one's own frustrated longing for it, like how you were mean to the boy/girl you had a crush on in fifth grade. Two, the idea that faster storage is "wasted" without SATA III's throughput ignores the fact that conventional HDDs can't even max out SATA I (150 MB/s). By that same logic, you could make the case that the PS4's stock hard drive represents a waste of the hardware's potential, modest though it is. Where gaming hardware is concerned, overkill is better than underkill, period. No, you won't hit linear reads and writes in excess of 500 MB/s on a PS4, but you will still absolutely blow the doors off ANY HDD. More importantly, an SSD's vastly superior random read/write speeds and IOPS (input-output per second) aren't constrained by SATA spec so you'll get your full money's worth there.

But that's all fairly academic. How does this translate into actual performance improvements? Here's what I've noticed so far:

1) Cold-booting is now so fast that the PS4 OS doesn't have time to load the irritating lawyer-appeasing "See Safety Warnings" message—it jumps straight into the home screen!
2) Bloodborne loads have gone from 45-60 seconds to 10-15. Whereas before I'd have to stare at 3-5 item descriptions, it now never goes past 1. Unfortunately, I put over 100 hours into the game before I put this drive in. Had I been playing with an SSD, my playtime probably would've been closer to 80 hours. :(
3) Loading missions in Destiny used to take an ungodly amount of time—we're talking several minutes in some cases. Now it usually takes less than a minute, constrained only by the obligatory story dialogue. The UI is also snappier overall (paging between menu screens, interacting with NPCs, etc.), but since a lot of Destiny's content is streaming from Bungie's servers, upgrading your hard drive mostly benefits single-player content (i.e. story missions).
4) There's no perceptible improvement in launching VOD services (Netflix et al) since the bottleneck there is network speed, not local storage.
5) Small games (think 2D indies) see minimal benefits.
5) Installing content is faster, but not that much faster. This is really the only area where the limitations of the PS4's SATA interface are obvious.

If you've always wanted to put an SSD in your PS4, now is the time, and this is the SSD. It's the best value for a 1TB drive on the market right now, and its MLC NAND should last longer than the cheaper TLC used in most competing drives. The only straightforwardly superior drive is Samsung's 850 EVO, but that costs about $80 more (as of this writing) and won't be any faster in a PS4. If you play a lot of big (30GB+) games and get them digitally, this will deliver a larger quality of life improvement than a new car or a raise. If you still play from discs, this SSD is the reason to go digital.

35 people found this helpful

Helpful

Spencer R.

Five Stars with a Caveat for Mid-Year 2012 Mac Pro Users - You may need to replace the SATA cable

Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2018

Verified Purchase

If you are looking to breath new life into your older Mac this is a fantastic upgrade. I installed this in a mid-year 2012 Macbook Pro. I migrated my existing hard drive to the new one (you will need some sort of SATA connection kit to do this) successfully and was able to test it by booting it via a USB connection prior to starting the computer. HOWEVER, when I installed the drive in the Mac it would not recognize the drive. I pulled it out, checked the old drive and found it worked flawlessly. Booted the new drive again from a USB connection and again, everything was perfect. After doing this a few times I spend some time researching the issue. It turns out that the SATA cable connecting the drive to the board does not always support a SATA III connection. I ordered a replacement cable from a reputable website and everything worked flawlessly once it was replaced.

If you are wondering how faster this drive is than the stock Macbook PRO drive, I did a little test. Booting MS Word from the stock drive took approximately 30 seconds. Using the new drive it takes around 3 seconds. HUGE improvement and I've noticed the same improvements pretty much across the board.

One person found this helpful

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R. W. Mercer

Wasn't worth it in the end, won't buy another Mushkin

Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2019

Verified Purchase

I bought this about 18 months ago to replace a 512g drive for gaming, but did not get round to actually making the switch, so it sat mostly idle for about a year, storing media files and ISO images. Seemed to be fast, and price was right at the time.

Last month, after a moderate amount of LIGHT usage, it suddenly stopped responding, triggered a reboot, and became unrecognizable. Lost some work due to spontaneous reboot, and of course lost the files on it.

Now if plugged in to a power supply it triggers the short circuit protection and causes a power cycle.

I've submitted an RMA request, we shall see what happens with that.

Last drive I had that failed this spectacularly was an OCZ, and we know what happened to them. Hopefully Mushkin isn't that bad. We shall see.

Helpful

Moss Parker

Great 1TB SSD for the price!

Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2016

Verified Purchase

I hadn't purchased a Mushkin memory product in quite some time. I was looking for a 1TB SDD that was available using Amazon Prime shipping and I compared specs and prices of all the drives listed. I chose the Mushkin because it was a few bucks cheaper than the others and was available for Prime overnight on Sunday to my address. Turns out I made a great choice. I put the Mushkin in the same computetr that houses a 1TB Samsung EVO, two Elucitronics 1TBs, and a SanDisk 1TB. The new Mushkin performs on par with any of the other drives, and appears to be a little faster than both the EVO and the SanDisk drives when transferring large files (50-75GB ISOs). While I didn't run any performance checks on the drive (i.e., these speed distinctions may be purely subjective), it is safe to say that the Mushkin drive is definitely in the same performance class as the others. The price/performance ratio was so good that I decided to purchase a second one for use in my EEG lab. As for longevity, based on my prior experiences with Mushkin DRAM, I suspect that these drives will serve reliably for a long time (at least until 2TB drives substantially come down in price, at which time I will replace the 1TB drives). Looking at the physical units, I suspect that these drives are being manufactured in the same Mexican plant as the Elucitronics I have (excellent products, BTW).

One person found this helpful

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Daniel

It should clip into place like every other SATA drive I've ever used

Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2016

Verified Purchase

Its price and capacity really gave it the selling point I wanted, but I can't give it a full 5 stars because the SATA and power connectors don't have any kind of hold on the cables. they slide in, and any force at all will slide them out, even just trying to slightly move the SATA cable when wrapping them together causes the end to slide out, and I have to pull the cable a bit to make it stay plugged in as I wrap it. It should clip into place like every other SATA drive I've ever used. This made it difficult to cable manage, and why I had to knock it down a point.

Do bear in mind this unit may not work on all SATA controllers. It did not work on my ASMedia controller for more than 10 minutes before dismounting itself and disappearing from the computer. It works just fine on my AMD SB950, and my Intel P55 SATA controllers. No points off, but compatibility should be considered before purchasing.

3 people found this helpful

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Mushkin REACTOR 1TB Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) 2.5 Inch SATA III 6Gb/s MLC 7mm MKNSSDRE1TB,Black

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