Launched alongside the company’s high-performance Mushkin Gamma SSD, the Mushkin Delta (starts at $149.99 for 1TB; $299.99 for 2TB as tested) is less of difference-maker. The Delta is a more typical offering from a company known for its value-priced SSDs. The Delta’s test scores are middling compared with those of similar SSDs, and it’s merely decent as a budget drive, with a low durability rating typical of drives based on cost-saving quad-level cell (QLC) memory. Look at it as an SSD price play for a budget PC with a late-model motherboard that can leverage a PCI Express 4.0-bus drive. The one possible point of interest? Mushkin’s aggressively priced 4TB version comes in at $499.99.
Mushkin Queues Up Some Delta Blues
The Delta is a four-lane PCI Express (PCIe) 4.0 drive, based on 3D QLC NAND flash memory and featuring a Phison E16 controller. It is built in the M.2 Type-2280 “gumstick” form factor common among modern internal SSDs. It employs the NVMe 1.3 protocol over its PCIe 4.0 bus. (Baffled by some of these terms? Check out our handy SSD dejargonizer.)
Although the Delta (like all PCIe 4.0 drives) is backward-compatible with motherboards that support PCI Express 3.0, to get the most out of this drive you need a system with a motherboard whose chipset supports PCI Express 4.0. These include a select group of late-model AMD boards for Ryzen CPUs, as well as 2021’s Intel Z590-based boards designed for the company’s 10th Generation and 11th Gen (“Rocket Lake”) CPUs. You may have to install such a motherboard yourself, as support for PCIe 4.0 SSDs is spotty in prebuilt systems, barring some of the latest ones on upper-end chipsets. Laptop support, in the form of accessible, upgradable M.2 slots that support 4.0, are spottier still.
One advantage of QLC-based memory is that high-capacity drives employing it can be manufactured at a reasonable cost. Thus, the Mushkin Delta comes in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, while the TLC memory-based Mushkin Gamma maxes out at 2TB. We have reviewed another QLC-based drive, the Sabrent Rocket Q, in its 8TB (!) capacity, as well as the 4TB Sabrent Rocket Q4, another PCI Express 4.0 QLC-based drive.
The main downside of QLC-based drives is that they tend not to be quite as durable as their TLC kin, at least as measured by their terabytes written (TBW) rating. “Terabytes written” is an estimate, according to the manufacturer, of how much data can be written to the drive in its lifetime before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. The 1TB Delta is rated at 200TBW, the 2TB model at 400TBW, and the 4TB version at 800TBW. (TBW generally scales with capacity, as it does here.)
In comparison, TLC-based SSDs tend to be much more durable. For instance, the Mushkin Gamma is rated at 700TBW for its 1TB version and 1,400TBW for 2TB, while our top-rated ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Lite comes in at 740TBW for 1TB and 1,480TBW for 2TB. Yet another TLC-based drive we recently tested, the Silicon Power US70, is even more durable, based on its 3,600TBW rating for its 2TB version and 1,800TBW for the 1TB model.
Mushkin backs the Delta with a five-year warranty. As is typical of internal SSDs, the coverage expires if the drive is driven past its TBW rating—even if it’s within the warranty period. (The drive’s firmware tracks lifetime data-write use, like an odometer.)
At 15 cents per gigabyte for both its 1TB and 2TB models, and 12 cents per gig for the 4TB version, the Delta is priced at the low end of the PCI Express 4.0 scale. It is priced similarly to the ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Lite, PCMag’s Editors’ Choice budget PCIe 4.0 SSD, which sells for 14 cents per gigabyte for its 1TB model and 15 cents per gig for 2TB. In contrast, the Samsung SSD 980 Pro, our Editors’ Choice high-end internal M.2 SSD, currently sells for 20 or 21 cents per gigabyte (the 1TB and 2TB versions, respectively), while the 1TB Mushkin Gamma sells for 21 cents per gigabyte and the 2TB version for 20 cents per gig.
The Delta lacks a heat sink or spreader, but its firmware—the Mushkin Enhanced Data-protection Suite (MEDS)—includes thermal monitoring and power management. Also supported is a litany of common SSD features: low-density parity-check (LDPC) error-correction code (ECC), internal SRAM ECC parity protection, and end-to-end data path protection, plus support for AES 128-bit/256-bit hardware encryption.
The Gamma lacks an SSD-management software suite of its own, as well as any data-transfer or -copy tools. Contrast that with offerings such as Samsung Magician and that company’s Data Migration app, which come with the Samsung SSD 980 and the 980 Pro. You’ll have to rely on your own utility finds or freeware for drive operations like cloning.
Testing the Mushkin Delta: Speeds Befitting a Budget-Priced Drive
We test PCIe 4.0 solid-state drives on a desktop system with an MSI Godlike X570 motherboard and an AMD Ryzen 9 CPU installed. The testbed has 16GB of DDR4 Corsair Dominator RAM clocked to 3,600MHz and a GeForce RTX graphics card handing display output.
PCMark 10 Overall Storage Test
PCMark 10’s overall storage benchmark, from UL—the world’s leading independent benchmark developer—runs a full suite of typical drive-access tasks. The scores below tagged as the Overall Score are the software’s sanctioned results, representing how well a drive does throughout the entire PCMark 10 run.
After that are some more granular measures derived from PCMark 10’s background “traces.” These represent a simulation of how quickly a drive is capable of executing the key kinds of file reads to launch a particular program, or in the case of our first trace, Windows 10, completing the operating system startup procedure.
Next comes a game-launching test set, which simulates how quickly a drive can read shallow-depth small random 4K packages, one of the more commonly used file-block sizes for game installations. The drives are also put through a launch test for Adobe creative apps. As anyone who works with video or images in Adobe Premiere Pro or Photoshop can tell you, these powerful programs can leave you waiting while they launch.
Finally there are the PCMark 10 copy tests, also derived from PCMark 10 traces. These numbers might look low compared with the straight sequential-throughput numbers achieved in benchmarks like Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and AS-SSD, charted further down, but that’s due to the way this score is calculated and the nature of (and differences between) the source data sets. (See more about how we test SSDs.)
The Delta’s PCMark 10 Overall score was in the lower third of the scores from the drives listed on our chart, which include a variety of both PCI Express 3.0 and PCI Express 4.0 internal SSDs. Its Windows 10 Launch score was similarly lackluster. The Delta’s game-launching and ISO and file copy scores were average. Its brightest spot in PCMark 10 testing was in Adobe creative program launching, in which it ranked near the top in both the Photoshop and Premiere Pro launch tests.
Sequential Speed and Copy Tests
Moving on from PCMark 10-derived numbers, the Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential tests provide a more traditional measure, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. After that is a series of file and folder transfers done in the SSD benchmarking utility AS-SSD. This trio of tests involves copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another.
In Crystal DiskMark testing, the Delta’s sequential read and write scores of 4,941MBps and 3,595MBps and were quite close to its 4,975MBps read and 3,750MBps write ratings. Its 4K read score was above average, while its 4K write score was a bit below. Finally, the Delta’s AS-SSD ISO, program, and game speed results were all below average.
Mega Capacity at a Budget Price
The Mushkin Delta is modestly priced for a PCI Express 4.0 drive, and its benchmark results were predictably in line, though it’s no slowpoke. It has faster sequential read and write scores than the ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Lite, our top pick as a budget PCI Express 4.0 SSD, but those are best-case-scenario transfers done under ideal conditions. In most of the other tests—including PCMark 10 Overall and Crystal DiskMark 4K read and write—the S50 Lite outmatched the Delta.
As a QLC drive, the Delta also has a lower durability rating than the S50 Lite and other TLC-memory drives. But unlike the S50 Lite and most TLC drives, including the Mushkin Gamma, the Delta does offer a 4TB version—with its promise of cavernous storage—for just 12 cents per gigabyte. If you need lots of storage on the cheap that you won’t write to all day, every day, now there’s a bargain worth considering.
