Mushkin releases their Helix-L series of NVMe SSDs

Mushkin has officially released their new Helix-L series of M.2 NVMe SSDs, offering users capacities of 250GB, 500GB and 1TB over a 4x PCIe 3.0 interface. 

The Helix-L series is designed to act as a cost-effective storage solution, sitting within the standards M.2 2280 (22mm wide/80mm long) form factor while using 3D TLC memory and a Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller. 

In terms of raw sequential performance, the Helix-L 1TB can deliver read speeds of up to 2110MB/s and write speeds of up to 1700MB/s, which is not as high as what can be offered by many competing PCIe 3.0 4x devices. When it comes to 4K random performance the Helix-L 1TB can provide 240,000 read IOPS and 260,000 write IOPS. All drives within the Helix-L range ship with a 3-year warranty. 

Thankfully the Helix-L has been updated since CES 2019 to include a black PCB, with prototypes of the drive coming with a green PCB. The main downsides of this drive is its use of four PCIe 3.0 lanes despite the fact that the drive isn’t much faster than PCIe 3.0 x2 M.2 SSDs from competing brands, making this drive’s use of two additional PCIe lanes effectively useless.