Mushkin Enhanced Chronos MKNSSDCR240GB 2.5" 240GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Pros: When it works, it's fast.

Cons: Unreliable!!!!! I ordered 2 of these units 1 month apart for 2 high-end custom-built systems. The first one started failing 6 days after the system was delivered (I should specify that I keep my custom-builds in test for 48 hours before I deliver them). No sign of instability at all during the test. 6 days later the system started freezing up randomly (not restarting itself) and showed pink horizontal stripes on the screens. The system became totally unresponsive forcing the user to manually shut down. The fact that I could never see it happen didn’t help of course, so I had to rely on the user’s description of the issue and try to troubleshoot “in the dark”. The symptoms were quite similar to those of a failing VGA card. Replaced VGA card first.... didn't make any difference. I turned my attention to the SSD; first I changed SATA3 port and cable; no dice. Then I put it on a SATA2 port with a new SATA2 cable; no difference. Then considering the oddity of the situation I cloned the SSD (which was a challenge since the drive kept freezing up during the cloning procedure), dumped the clone onto a Corsair SSD drive, fired up the system and the problem magically disappeared. The second system I built with this unit 1 month later failed after 48 hours but with a completely different error: the motherboard (ASUS P8Z77-M) would not even detect the drive anymore. I jiggled data and power cable repeatedly with the same result. Then all of a sudden after 8-10 restarts the SSD would get detected and the system would start. If I restarted Windows I would go back to square 1 with a "No bootable device found". After changing ports and cables I tried to get my own server to detect the SSD; it detected it only 1time out of 5 restarts. Newegg sent me a new identical SSD for this one and thank goodness it's been working since; however as a professional, 2 bad units out of 3 is something I don't want to deal with ever again. If you're willing to gamble this unit is fairly inexpensive and works fast, but is it really worth all of this time, frustration and 2 unhappy customers?

Other Thoughts: I've been custom building servers, laptops and high-end computers for 29 years now; I have well over 5,000 builds under my belt and this kind of issue is not something I am willing to put up with. The hours of troubleshooting and repair involved in addition to the customer's unhappiness really ticked me off. Fortunately my customers have been with me for so many years that they know this type of issue is beyond my control; the problem is that I expect the products that I recommend to live up to their name and reputation. This one OBVIOUSLY DOESN’T. Mushkin people: get it together. I don’t know what kind of nerve you have to put such and under-developed product on the market and expect customers to be your guinea-pig! As far as I’m concerned you’ve lost not only my company as a customer, but most people who will read this review.

Pros: none

Cons: Failed after 1 day taking all my data with it...

Other Thoughts: Bought it because I was running out of space for my flight sims moved several sims over to it and it died a day later..

Pros: When it works, it was fast, and the capacity for the price was good. Support was good -- I'm just rating the product, not the support.

Cons: My first drive became unresponsive after maybe 6 months of usage; I'm not sure if there was data corruption before that. The RMA staff said it had panic locked. After a few months of very light use, my new drive is now throwing errors in `dmesg` (the Linux kernel driver message log); yes, I am running stable file-systems (ext4, luks) and this problem doesn't occur on other drives.

Other Thoughts: Maybe Linux doesn't do TRIM well enough? I'm not sure; all I know is that it doesn't work as it should. I got an Intel SSD (520) and haven't had any problems with that; I'll probably stick with Intel from this point forward.

Pros: Put it in my gaming PC and it would boot up windows in about 10 seconds. Programs were instantly available. The specs are right up there with the Samsungs and OCZs that cost significantly more. I absolutely loved it.

Cons: It's been about 5 months after I bought it and it has quit working. The computer I have it in is a gaming PC and I primarily use my laptop for day to day work, so I use the desktop a few times a week. Two weeks ago I turned the computer on and it couldn't find a bootable disk. I went into BIOS and it did not see the drive. I restarted the computer, went into BIOS and the drive was there... weird. Yesterday I started my computer and no bootable drive was found. I restarted and still no drive. I swapped cables, ports, etc and no drive. I put it in another computer, no drive. I'm pretty sure it's dead.

Other Thoughts: I have requested an RMA and am well within the three year limited warranty span so hopefully I get a replacement that is more reliable. I have two other Mushkin SSDs as well - a 60 GB asynchronous Chronos that holds my VMs on that same desktop and a 120 GB Chronos Deluxe that is in my laptop. The laptop is used every day and I have yet to experience any hard drive problems with it, so maybe the Deluxe models are more resilient. I would characterize my hard drive usage on the model that failed as extremely low, since I only have the OS and progams/games on it - all my other data is stored on a network drive, so the writes should be very minimal on the SSD. It should not have failed. I will revisit this rating depending on my experience with the RMA process.

Pros: When it worked it was great. Brought an old Dell XPS back to life. The price when I bought it was less than it is today. Great value.

Cons: Went bad slowly. It caused many hours of troubleshooting and wasted time. I wish it would have just died straight away.

Other Thoughts: Bought it Dec. 24th 2012. RMA'd May 28th 2013. It's been slowly going bad over the last 2 or 3 months. I didn't think anything of it since it was put into an almost 6 year old computer which it brought back from the dead. Over the last 2 or 3 months the PC would not boot because drive wasn't registering and it was the boot drive. I would disconnect and reconnect it and it would come back...sometimes. Sometimes I would leave the PC off for a few days(it's a secondary gaming PC) and then turn it back on. It would work then. As of two days ago the drive was not being recognized at all. In ANYTHING. External drive bays. NOPE. Laptop. NOPE. 3rd drive in main PC. NOPE. So I knew it was time for a replacement.

Hopefully the replacement does better. I'm just not looking forward to a reinstall of OS and all the programs. Good thing my Steam library is on the secondary HDD.

Pros: size, price, sata 3, ssd

Cons: very unreliable, legacy CMOS 75% of the time won't see it.

Pros: It worked great, as expected SATA III 240GB

Cons: BSOD happened multiple times, then it stopped booting into windows. I though surely it wasn't the drive, well it was. I tested it on multiple ports, multiple externals, multiple systems. I was shocked that I couldn't get a single thing to recognize the existence of the disk. BIOS would never recognize it.

Pros: This does run at advertized specifications and I paid $150

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: I got this on sale for $150 and it does run at advertized specifications. I put this in my MSI GT70

Pros: The price for a 240 Gb SSD was OK.

Cons: Let me see the hard drive is the slowest part of my whole build how is that for a con!?!?!? Sabertooth AMD MB, 4.0 Ghz AMD Vishera 8 core processor etc, etc. It took much to get it initialized and then it scores a 7.0.

Other Thoughts: They have better models but not going to be the guinea pig.

Pros: Purchased this drive for my new build. This was my first SSD experience and it has been pleasant thus far. PC takes about 12.5 seconds to boot (from pressing the power button to login screen). Read/write speeds are good as well.

Cons: No cons.

Other Thoughts: Before I purchased this drive, I read through the reviews and saw a couple of people recommend installing the newest firmware right away to prevent stability issues. I did this the second the drive was installed and I haven't experienced a single problem in the time that I've had this drive.