Mushkin Chronos MX 120GB SSD Review

Inside the Chronos MX

Opening the shell, like most other drives, simply requires the removal of four small screws. Doing so voids the warranty so don’t follow our example.

After opening, the PCB is unencumbered and comes out easily.

On the first side of the PCB, we see eight of the NAND modules which is half of the sixteen total on the drive.

A closer look reveals the MLC synchronous flash chips to be manufactured by Intel and each are 8GB in density apiece for a total of 128GB capacity. The part number on the MLCN NAND is 29F64G08ACME3 and are made on the 25nm manufacturing process.

Flipping the board over we find the remaining flash modules along with the popular SandForce controller off to the side.

What more can we say about the SandForce (now LSI) SF-2281 controller that we haven’t said dozens of times already. It’s one of the most popular SSD controllers on the market and for good reason. Performance is top notch, especially on data that can be compressed which happens real-time via the controller. Its DuraClass technology handles a myriad of functions such as data encryption, wear-leveling, error correction, and maintenance functions such as idle garbage collection and TRIM (where supported by the OS). We’ve seen a ton of drives with this very controller and expect them to keep coming. Let’s have a quick look at the test bench and comparison drives.