PNY XLR8 CS3140 1TB
Can PNY’s fat new SSD keep cool under pressure from its rivals?
SOME SSD MANUFACTURERS go into forensic detail when it comes to the speeds and feeds for their latest and greatest M.2 drive. But not PNY. The new PNY XLR8 CS3140, reviewed here in 1TB trim and also available with a tasty 2TB of storage, is a case in point.
No question, we know it’s a high-end model, with the quad-lane PCIe Gen 4 interface, claimed read speeds up to 7,500MB/s, proper TLC flash memory rather than cheap QLC chips, and that big, fat heat sink. Indeed, it’s faster on paper than both Sabrent’s Rocket 4 Plus and the Samsung 980 Pro, both of which are pegged at 7,000MB/s. It’s even a whisker ahead of the Adata XPG Gammix S70, which tops out at 7,400MB/s.
That kind of raw pace is also beginning to bump up against the theoretical 8GB/s limit of quad-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface. But as far as the details go, that’s about it. Okay, PNY also quotes sequential writes speeds, 5,650MB/s for this 1TB model and 6,850MB/s for the 2TB. But it conspicuously doesn’t list random access IOPS performance or much by way of configuration details.
What’s the controller chipset? How about write endurance? The XLR8 CS3140 comes with a five-year warranty, so you could argue the specifics of aspects such as write endurance are academic. But no matter, we can confirm the XLR8 CS3140 sports a Phison PS5018-E18 controller and four 256GB packages of Micron 96-Layer 3D TLC NAND.
The former is the same chip you’ll find in the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. As we’ve previously observed, the E18 is an eight-channel NVMe 1.4 chip cranked out on TSMC’s 12nm process and packing five cores, three generic ARM Cortex R5 designs, and two proprietary Phison items. According to Phison, the E18 is good for 7.4GB/s read and 7GB/s write speeds, plus the minor matter of one million IOPS.
In other words, it’s pretty much state of the art by client PC SSD standards. So, you’d have thought PNY would be happy to list it in the spec sheet. The same goes for the 1GB of DDR4 cache memory. But enough with the specs, what about the XLR8 CS3140’s actual performance?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it mirrors the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus across most of our standard benchmark suite. So, peak throughput is bang on the Sabrent’s claimed 7,000MB/s performance rather than the 7,500MB/s PNY lists. Write speeds are lower than the Sabrent’s, but then the Rocket 4 Plus was reviewed in the faster 2TB configuration.
With the 4K IOPS performance, there’s nothing in it—which is to say that this drive puts out numbers that are excellent, but not absolutely at the leading edge of what a flash-based SSD can currently achieve. For that, you’d want WD’s Black SN850, albeit the delta isn’t huge. For a big step up in IOPS performance, only Intel’s Optane drives with their exotic 3D Xpoint phase-change memory will deliver.
As for sustained performance, during our pre-flight drive filling procedure, the XLR8 maintained its initial internal file copy performance of around 1.7GB/s for fully 300GB before dropping to between 400MB/s and 800MB/s. The drive stays cool throughout, topping out at a mere 36°C. So, that big, fat heat sink really works and the 300GB/s performance cliff, which is eminently acceptable, is a consequence of the size of the drive’s SLC cache rather than any thermal throttling.
The new PNY XLR8 CS3140 is therefore a strong all-round performer based on proven technology and backed by a lengthy warranty. As things stand, the XLR8 and the Sabrent Rocket are both available for $179, with the heat sink adding another $10, a premium we’d be tempted to pay. The only slight snag is that the WD Black SN850 is also available for $189 and is such a classy allround SSD, we’d find it hard to overlook.