PNY CS2211 XLR8 240GB Solid State Drive Review

Introduction Today's review is a special one for me as it is the first time I get to review a PNY SSD. I got the XLR8 CS2211 2.5-inch gaming branded SSD on the test bench today and it will be interesting to see how well it does. The PNY CS2211 SSD is available in three capacities from 240GB over 480GB to 960GB from which I'll be testing the 240GB model today. PNY is no stranger in the SSD market and they created some great drives in the past for all sectors of the market, but they're probably most known for their graphics cards. But we aren't here to talk about graphics cards, it is about storage today. PNY has taken what they have learned from their previous drives and created the XLR8 branded CS2211 drive, and it shows in the performance ratings. The drive is rated for a sequential performance of up to 565 MB/s reading and 540MB/s writing, which is about as good as it gets on the SATA3 interface. The random input-output performance is equally impressive with 95K IOPS ratings for both reading and writing. Those are at least the ratings for the larger models and the small 240GB version can't keep fully up with that. It still comes with impressive ratings despite being a little slower ,with an 87K IOPS rating and a drop in sequential writes to 470MB/s. It is no surprise that the drive has such good ratings as it is built with only the best components. It utilizes 15nm Toshiba MLC NAND and a Phison PS3110-S10 controller aided by 256MB DDR3 cache package PNY gave the CS2211 the XLR8 styling as a gaming product, but the design has been toned down a bit in comparison to the previous XLR8 drive design. It is a beautiful design that makes the drive stand out and also makes in an optimal candidate for systems that proudly shows what components they are made off. There are a lot of products that get a 'gaming' label in order to appeal to that market segment, but the CS2211 does deserve this label. It is a perfect gaming drive thanks to its high IOPS performance on top of the high sequential performance. You'll copy fast, load fast, and should experience even less loading times in-game. Feature wise we find the basic Trim and SMART capabilities, but the CS2211 also comes with background garbage collection, end-to-end data protection, and error correction code for up to 120 bits per 2K sector. Overall, we see a drive that presents itself very well and PNY agrees with a 2 million hours mean time before failure rating and a full 4-year warranty. The 7mm slim drive is perfect for usage in both desktop and notebook systems where it also will fit well in 9.5mm drive bays thanks to the included adapter bracket. The SSD doesn't feature the DevSleep function that I really like to see in drives, but that isn't a deal breaker and most gamers don't want power saving features, they want pure and raw performance which the CS2211 delivers. Aside from the beautiful brand sticker on the top, the drive is built with a standard 2-piece snap-together enclosure that holds the PCB and doesn't require any screws that could loosen themselves over time in high-vibration environments. The PCB itself is a two-thirds length one with a total of eight NAND chips distributed over the front and back. The Phison PS3110 S10C controller sits firmly in the middle of the PCB. Next to it we also see the Nanya DDR3 cache chip that helps the drive to achieve the great speeds that it can. Specifications Capacity: 240GB Part Number: SSD7CS2211-240-RB Form Factor: 2.5 inch Height: 7mm Interface: SATA-III 6Gb/s; backward compatible with SATA-II 3Gb/s Max Sequential Read Speed: 560 MB/s Max Sequential Write Speed: 470 MB/s Max Random Read Speed: 87,000 IOPS Max Random Write Speed: 95,000 IOPS NAND Type: MLC Ideal For: Gaming, Hard disk drive replacement, photo and video storage, and boot drives Packaging and Accessories The PNY XLR8 CS2211 solid state drive came packed in a simple black box with the PNY logo on the side. Inside the box is the SSD itself as well as a 9.5mm adapter for usage in notebooks and laptops designed for the 9.5mm thick drives. By adding the adapter to the drive, you make sure that it's firmly seated in the system and doesn't rattle around. Normally you'd get the drive in a more colourful wrapping and with an included registration key for the Acronis True Image cloning software. Review samples like this one sometimes come with a few things missing because the company is in a hurry to get the drives to us so we can test them for you - and they know that we don't need the extras. Software PNY doesn't have their own software toolbox for information, tuning, and troubleshooting, but they do have a firmware update utility that you can download from the official website. The tool is universal for all PNY drives and works in conjunction with firmware image files to check whether you have the newest firmware on your drive or not. As we can see in the screenshot below, our PNY CS2211 is running the latest one and is up to date. With a toolbox to check on our drive, we can always fall back onto CrystalDiskInfo that will provide us with all the information about the drive, from temperature over health to features and serial number. Testing & Methodology Hardware Supermicro C7Z97-OCE Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3 Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Sapphire R7 240 2GB be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 850W Thermaltake Water 3.0 Performer Lian Li PC-T60 Software AIDA64 Storage Benchmark Anvil's Storage Utilities AS SSD Benchmark ATTO Benchmark CrystalDiskMark IOMeter PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark In a bid to make our testing as thorough and as accurate as possible, we have devised a testing methodology to give us the maximum amount of data. Whilst this means that testing each drive will take considerably longer to test – nearly 36 hours - the picture that we are able to build upon the overall performance of each drive is far clearer and it provides a more accurate analysis at how a drive performs under different conditions. There are many ways to test a storage drive and we have chosen to include close to every test possible. We will start with a normal benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various fillage scenarios. Depending on how a drive is built, it might perform differently depending on how much data it already is storing. To test this, the drive will be tested empty as well as with 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage. For these tests, we will be using Anvil's Storage Utilities, AS SSD Benchmark, ATTO Benchmark, and CrystalDiskMark. Besides these synthetic fill tests, the drive will also be tested with PCMark 8's storage benchmark in order to get real-world performance results. Following the fillage tests, the partition will be removed and we test the drive's raw performance. These tests will determine the hardware's capabilities while removing any interference from the set file system. AIDA64's storage benchmark, IOmeter, and HD Tach are all great tools for this and they help us paint an even clearer picture of the drive. Durability is also a factor when it comes to NAND-based drives as the chips only can be rewritten so many times before they'll stop working properly. Modern SSDs come with wear-level algorithms to increase the lifetime and reduce this factor as much as possible. We also take this into consideration in our reviews, but real-world conditions would take years to complete. Luckily Anvil's Storage Utilities comes with an endurance test to simulate this. It is considerably faster, but it is still a process that can take up to three days where we'll write up to 15 TB data to the drive in the form of thousands and thousands of small files in various sizes and compressibility. Following the conditioning process, all of the previous benchmarks will be run again in the same scenarios and order. This will give us a great view on how a drive will perform after 3 years of usage and that is a very relevant factor. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn't something normal users need to worry about. However, For these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. We want a clear picture of the drives performance with minimal interference from the operating system. On each page that follows with the benchmark results, I have inserted the screenshots from the benchmark results, created a drive analysis chart for fill-level as well as a drive comparison chart for each software used, where possible. AIDA64 AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. It provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one I'll be using. Fresh Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives, as the name says, a linear view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are actually a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Conditioned Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives, as the name says, a linear view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are actually a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Anvil's Storage Utilities Anvil's Storage Utilities is a new benchmarking utility that we have started using here at eTeknix, it's completely free to download and has the ability to test mainly hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it. As well as testing the drive in a variety of benchmarking tests, it also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to give days, months and potentially even years of use in a shorter period of time to see how the drive copes in the longer term. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Performance Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill. AS SSD The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system caches. In Sequential tests, the program measures the time it takes to read and write a 1 GB file respectively. To give a clearer picture of the drives tested, I've chosen to include all tests. Special the copy test is one that I think is relevant on the consumer level as it gives the user a view into one of the operations he's going to do many times. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Performance Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill. ATTO The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Performance Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random 4KB/512KB read/write speeds. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Performance Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill. IOmeter & PCMark 8 IOmeter OMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behavior of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS. IOMeter allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the ‘Maximum Disk Size’, ‘Starting Disk Sector’ and ‘# of Outstanding I/Os’. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the ‘Access Specifications’ configure the I/O types to the file. Configurable items within the Access Specifications are Transfer Request Size, Percent Random/Sequential distribution, Percent Read/Write Distribution, Aligned I/O’s, Reply Size, and TCP/IP status among others. Sequential Performance Random 4K Performance Drive Comparison PCMark 8 PCMark 8 Storage benchmark is used test the performance of SSDs, HDDs and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games. You can test any recognized storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Comparison Final Thoughts Pricing At the time of writing, the new PNY XLR8 CS2211 can be tricky to find in Europe. In fact, I couldn't find a single shop having it available yet. In the US, it's already widely available and definitely a drive to check out, for example from NewEgg for just $84.99 or $69.99 through PNY's own website. Conclusion It was a real pleasure to have PNY's XLR8 CS2211 SSD drive in the testing area today and I wasn't disapointed one bit. The drive has a beautiful designed enclosure that showcases the XLR8 branding in a toned down version compared to the predecessor. It is also a drive that would be a great in any system, workstation or gaming system, stationary or portable. The drive is built around quality components such as 15nm Toshiba MLC NAND and a Phison controller that coupled together drive this SSD to some great performance figures. We saw a solid and strong performance from this 240GB model which is the slowest rated drive in the new CS2211 series, which also means that you'll get an even better performance from the larger versions. The drive had no trouble living up to the rated performance and also went past it several times. PNY is backing this drive with a full 4-year warranty which means that you don't need to register the drive or anything to get a 2+2 year warranty, or similar things. It also comes with a high 2 million hours MTBF which speaks for PNY's trust in the quality that they deliver. That doesn't come a big surprise after the conditioning tests to simulate wear and tear, which the CS2211 mastered without any trouble what so ever. Pros Great performance Low price Good looking design 4-year warranty Cons Availability Neutral No DevSleep feature "Whether your system is for gaming or working, portable or stationary, the PNY XLR8 CS2211 should be on your watch list. Great performance and reliability." Thank you PNY for providing us with this sample.

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