If there's one thing Mushkin is good at, it is making cheap SSDs – really cheap SSDs. Today, the Texas-based company struck again by announcing the availability of its ECO2 line of SSDs, which are some of the least expensive SSDs money can buy.
Of course, to keep the price of these SSDs as low as possible, sacrifices have to be made on the hardware side, which is probably the reason why Mushkin hasn't immediately disclosed what brand of flash memory it used. All we know is that it is MLC-based. We also know that the drives use a SandForce SF-2200 controller, which may be a bit dated.
The units aren't slow by any means, though. All of the capacities will read sequentially at up to 550 MB/s, and they will write at speeds between 485 and 530 MB/s, depending on the capacity. Random 4K write IOPS also range from 32,000 through 87,000 IOPS. Fortunately, they also support TRIM commands, so performance should remain consistent.
All the ECO2 SSDs are built in a 7 mm thick 2.5" enclosure and have a backwards-compatible SATA3 6 Gb/s interface.
Pricing for the units range from $39.99 through $159.99, which is for capacities ranging from 60 GB through 480 GB. Yes, that's right, the 480 GB variant will bring you storage at just 33 cents per gigabyte. Convincing that friend of yours who's been stuck using his hard drive to get an SSD just got a whole lot easier. Mushkin's ECO2 SSDs are exclusively available through Newegg, with all the units listed here.
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