PNY XLR8 CS3140 M.2 NVMe Gen4 SSD Review

Preparation

The drive will be formatted as NTFS with default settings, as most users will do. The quick format option isn’t used as that might affect the performance the first time data is written.

Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn’t something to worry about for regular users. 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. After all, we want a clear picture of the drive’s performance with minimal interference from the operating system.

Data

We will start with a typical benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various fillage scenarios. However, depending on how a drive is built, the performance may differ depending on how much data it is already storing. The drive will be tested empty and at 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage for this area. We’re using Anvil’s Storage Utilities, AS SSD Benchmark, and CrystalDiskMark for this part of the review.

Application and Gaming

Besides the synthetic fill tests, the drive is tested with PCMark 10’s storage benchmark to get real-world performance results for various gaming and application usages.

Drive Conditioning

Durability is a vital factor in NAND-based drives as the chips can only be rewritten so often 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. Where appropriate, we will test this using Anvil’s Storage Utilities. Following this conditioning process, all of the previous benchmarks will be run again in the same scenarios and the same order.

Hardware

• ASRock X570 ProM
• AMD 3700X
• GeForce RTX 2080
• Crucial Sport 4 x 8GB 3200MHz DDR4
• be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 (1200W)
• Noctua NH-U15S

Software

• Anvil’s Storage Utilities
• AS SSD Benchmark
• ATTO Benchmark
• CrystalDiskMark
• PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark
• Windows 11 64 bit