SSD technology has advanced to a stage where it is possible to have flash drives with bona-fide SSD controllers. The addition of a SATA to USB 3.0 bridge provides an ubiquitous high-speed direct attached storage interface. We have already looked at the Phison S9-based Corsair Flash Voyager GTX and the SandForce SF2281-based Mushkin Ventura Ultra. Our review of the Mushkin Ventura Ultra 120GB drive had a comment about the devices thermal throttling issues. This piqued our interest and we set out to see if any of the other units evaluated before had such issues. Obviously, we were also interested in determining whether our Ventura Ultra sample had the problem. In the case of throttling, we also wanted to make our review complete by bringing out the circumstances under which it would trigger. As we will see further down in this piece, our experiments did find evidence of throttling in the Mushkin Ventura Ultra.

Recently, we also received a sample of another SSD controller-based flash drive. Putting that drive through our throttling test revealed even worse results compared to the Mushkin Ventura Ultra. Upon our feedback, the manufacturer is contemplating a firmware update. In this piece, we will refer to the unit as BrandX 240GB (a complete review of the unit with benchmark numbers will be published once the manufacturer provides us a resolution for the throttling issue). The list of DAS units put under the performance consistency scanner is provided below.