Mushkin Pilot NVMe SSD review

Tiny marvel

TechRadar Verdict

The Mushkin Pilot NVMe SSD is certainly a good choice if you’re looking for a budget-friendly SSD upgrade for your PC. It won’t blow you away with its speeds, but that’s not to say it’s sluggish in any way.

Pros

  • +

    Decent speeds

  • +

    Affordable

Cons

  • -

    Brittle design

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Mushkin seem to be really hitting the market hard with affordable storage solutions, and their latest offering is the Pilot NVMe SSD. Available in capacities of 120GB all the way up to 2TB, we’re looking at the 500GB version in this review.

Priced at $127, it’s a great bargain drive if your motherboard has an M.2 slot handy. This means that in more compact PCs, you can use an SSD or regular HDD as a secondary data drive.

Features and design

The Pilot NVMe SSD comes in a basic plastic pack with very little information about the drive printed on it until you actually open it up and scan through the included leaflet. What’s slightly annoying about this plastic packaging is that it doesn’t properly protect the Pilot NVMe SSD, so our unit actually had a slight bend to it when we unpacked it.

Mushkin says that the drive features an enhanced data-protection suite to allow for data correction and protection, which not only ensures the integrity of your data, but also the longevity of the actual physical drive. Backed by a 3-year warranty and a MTBF (mean time before failure) of 1.5m hours.

Performance

BENCHMARKS

Crystaldisk Mark (Sequential) Read: 2690 MB/s; Write: 1294.6 MB/s
Crystaldisk Mark (Random) Read: 464.2 MB/s; Write: 397.6 MB/s
ATTO Benchmark (Sequential) Read: 2484.6 MB/s; Write: 1630.2 MB/s 

When it comes to cheaper SSDs, there’s always room to worry about performance. After all, it’s not easy to get a drive that delivers strong performance while still being wallet-friendly. Thankfully, the Mushkin Pilot NVMe SSD performs as per the company’s claims, and while it won’t break any speed records, it still delivers great performance during regular use as well as when launching programs.

Final verdict

It’s important to remember that the Mushkin Pilot NVMe SSD isn’t out to set any new records when it comes to transfer speeds. Instead, it holds fast as a speedy drive that is more than adequate of taking on your daily PC toils. 

Write performance is consistently strong, so no matter what you’re doing with this drive you never experience any slowdowns, especially when it comes to application multitasking and quickly booting into Windows. Build quality is the only thing we cut a few points off for, but once it’s installed in your PC you can safely leave it to tackle whatever you throw at it.

Nick Rego

A former IT & Marketing Manager turned full time Editor, Nick enjoys reviewing PC components, 3D Printers, projectors, and anything shiny and expensive. He can also be found baking up a storm in the kitchen, which we are more than happy to encourage.