Mushkin REACTOR 1TB Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) 2.5 Inch SATA III 6Gb/s MLC 7mm MKNSSDRE1TB,Black

I bought this for my PS4 after long years of fantasizing about replacing the sluggish stock 5400 RPM HDD with a big SSD. Obviously the limiting factor for a long time was cost per GB: when the PS4 came out, 1TB SSDs were priced out of reach for most mere mortals (~$1000). Happily, that's no longer the case. SSD prices have absolutely cratered in the last year or so, and the $230 or so that this drive costs is an absolute steal for anyone who's been following SSD prices for a while.There are lots of forum posts and benchmarks claiming that an SSD isn't worth it in a PS4 because the PS4's aging SATA II drive interface can't take full advantage of an SSD's blistering speeds.I'd like to push back on this claim on two fronts. One, SSDs are now affordable enough that the cost-per-GB argument is now little more than a way to justify one's own reluctance to spend money. It's the classic psychological tactic of devaluing something to hide one's own frustrated longing for it, like how you were mean to the boy/girl you had a crush on in fifth grade. Two, the idea that faster storage is "wasted" without SATA III's throughput ignores the fact that conventional HDDs can't even max out SATA I (150 MB/s). By that same logic, you could make the case that the PS4's stock hard drive represents a waste of the hardware's potential, modest though it is. Where gaming hardware is concerned, overkill is better than underkill, period. No, you won't hit linear reads and writes in excess of 500 MB/s on a PS4, but you will still absolutely blow the doors off ANY HDD. More importantly, an SSD's vastly superior random read/write speeds and IOPS (input-output per second) aren't constrained by SATA spec so you'll get your full money's worth there.But that's all fairly academic. How does this translate into actual performance improvements? Here's what I've noticed so far:1) Cold-booting is now so fast that the PS4 OS doesn't have time to load the irritating lawyer-appeasing "See Safety Warnings" message—it jumps straight into the home screen!2) Bloodborne loads have gone from 45-60 seconds to 10-15. Whereas before I'd have to stare at 3-5 item descriptions, it now never goes past 1. Unfortunately, I put over 100 hours into the game before I put this drive in. Had I been playing with an SSD, my playtime probably would've been closer to 80 hours. :(3) Loading missions in Destiny used to take an ungodly amount of time—we're talking several minutes in some cases. Now it usually takes less than a minute, constrained only by the obligatory story dialogue. The UI is also snappier overall (paging between menu screens, interacting with NPCs, etc.), but since a lot of Destiny's content is streaming from Bungie's servers, upgrading your hard drive mostly benefits single-player content (i.e. story missions).4) There's no perceptible improvement in launching VOD services (Netflix et al) since the bottleneck there is network speed, not local storage.5) Small games (think 2D indies) see minimal benefits.5) Installing content is faster, but not that much faster. This is really the only area where the limitations of the PS4's SATA interface are obvious.If you've always wanted to put an SSD in your PS4, now is the time, and this is the SSD. It's the best value for a 1TB drive on the market right now, and its MLC NAND should last longer than the cheaper TLC used in most competing drives. The only straightforwardly superior drive is Samsung's 850 EVO, but that costs about $80 more (as of this writing) and won't be any faster in a PS4. If you play a lot of big (30GB+) games and get them digitally, this will deliver a larger quality of life improvement than a new car or a raise. If you still play from discs, this SSD is the reason to go digital.

Friend of mine handed me a credit card and said build me a new gaming rig. I was planning on using a Samsung drive because I have a 830 pro and it’s been flawless the last 3 years.But with all the problems popping up about the 840 series having the slow down bug, and the firmware issues people are having with the 850 series it scared me. I have a Crucial M500 but I was not all that impressed with reviews on the new Crucial MX & BX series. The Sandisk SSD’s sounded like a good option but I decided to go with the Mushkin Reactor.Now that I have the machine all finished I have been able to test the Reactor SSD out.EXCELLENT, once I made the normal SSD tweaks to Windows 7 like turning off the Search service and tweaks to disable PreFetching and Superfetch the Mushkin Reactor is pulling between 530-545 meg reads and 435-465 writes depending on the benchmark program you use.Mushkin’s Reactor is priced very nice for a 1 TB drive, the controller is older but its solid. Note there is no software for the Reactor, Samsung has their Magician and Intel has their optimizer tool but Mushkin has nothing so you will have to tweak your OS manually to get the most out of it.I guess the best way to describe the Reactor is that it’s not a flashy drive that has big marketing behind it, in fact it comes in a plain plastic clamshell with a Mushkin paper inlay. The drive uses tried and tested components that are not the absolute fastest thing out there but more than fast enough to be in the same class as the top end drives but it’s cheaper and it just works.This part is just for reference for those in the market to upgrade or just curious. This new machine is built around a Intel I7-4790k(not OC’d), MSI Z97 Gaming 7 motherboard ,MSI GTX 970 videocard ,Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB DDR3 1600mhz. Testing the machine with some basic benchmarks shows that the new machine is almost 25% faster than my 4.4ghz overclocked 2600k I built in Dec 2011.For my next machine that I build for myself I will seriously look at what Mushkin has on the market.The Reactor is overall just a very good solid SSD that I will recommend to my friends.I hope review\comment helps someone out there.