Stefan Mileschin

Mushkin introduced its new external SSDs featuring USB Type-C and Thunderbolt 3 interfaces and powered by desktop-class controllers. The Carbon X100 and the Carbon Z100 drives offer performance akin to that of internal SSDs and their sequential read and write speeds to some degree are limited by their interfaces.

Both the Carbon X100 and the Carbon Z100 external drives essentially integrate a desktop-class SSD featuring 3D NAND memory and an appropriate interface controller — a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C for the former as well as a Thunderbolt 3 for the latter. Meanwhile, Mushkin's new SSDs are considerably faster than the company's previous-generation external storage solutions.


We are going to start with the value Carbon X100, which external design looks surprisingly similar to that of MyDigitalSSD’s M2X enclosure. The Mushkin Carbon X100 is based on Silicon Motion’s SM2263XT controller and is equipped with 500 GB or 1 TB of 3D TLC NAND memory (so, think about Mushkin’s Helix-L SSD inside the chassis). The manufacturer rates their sequential performance at 1000 MB/s both for reads and writes, whereas random speeds are quoted at 115K/88K IOPS for reads and writes. The drives use a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C interface, which probably limits performance of the SSD. The Carbon X100 is still faster than all SATA 6 Gbps internal drives, yet its speeds are considerably slower than those of PCIe 3.0 x4-based solutions powered by the same controller.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13842...t-up-to-22-gbs