PNY XLR8 CS3140 1TB

GIVE IT UP FOR our second Phison E18-based drive, the PNY XLR8 CS3140. Handily, we have the PNY in 1TB format, allowing a look at both 1TB and 2TB drives with the controller du jour for drive integrators who don’t have the desire or means to do one in-house.

PNY is pretty punchy about the performance of this drive, claiming an eye-popping 7,500MB/s per second for sequential read performance, which is as fast as we can recall for a single consumer NAND-based SSD. For what it’s worth, that figure is also higher than the supposed maximum speed Phison claims for the E18 controller used by the CS3140. Make of that what you will.

Inevitably, writes are a little tardier at 5,650MB/s, which is actually in excess of 1GB/s slower than the

2TB variant of the CS3140. PNY doesn’t exactly share when it comes to details like maximum IOPS performance or the identity of the NAND chips it uses. The former is largely a known quantity thanks to the Phison controller and with a little digging around, the latter is revealed to be Micron’s 96-layer TLC rather than its latest 176-layer chips. Perhaps that aspect can change, hence PNY prefers not to tie the spec sheet to a particular NAND spec.

If that’s all fine, it is annoying that PNY doesn’t quote write endurance, opting to provide an MTBF or mean time before failure rating of two million hours. In our view, that’s fairly meaningless. You’d expect an SSD sitting around doing not much to last a long time, while a drive handling loads of write and erase traffic might tank relatively quickly.

Still, with the Phison controller, Micron NAND chips, a five-year warranty, and nice cool running (more on that later), it’s not like we’re actually concerned about longevity. We’d just prefer more clarity.

All that aside, this 1TB model of the PNY XLR8 CS3140 gets 1GB of DDR4 cache memory, plus the minor matter of a fat heatsink. Ostensibly, that bodes well for thermals. The complication is that many motherboards integrate their own heat spreaders, making the chunk of metal on the CS3140 arguably redundant.

Before anyone suggests it, however, this particular heatsink is not a sop for Sony PS5 owners—as is the case with so many SSDs of late, including the newly-tweaked Samsung 980 Pro Heatsink. As it happens, PNY’s cooler is twice as thick as the maximum specifications for that console, so it’s a non-starter.

As motherboard-based SSD cooling solutions vary, it’s not at all straightforward to determine whether

PNY’s heatsink solution will be better or worse by comparison. What we can say, however, is that not only does the PNY CS3140 run cooler than the other Phisonbased drives, it’s the coolest customer of all six SSDs here.

Anyway, in terms of tested performance peak throughput is a little less than we’d hoped for at a little over 7GB/s for reads and around 5.2GB/s for writes. The drive’s 4K sequential reads come in at 72MB/s, which again is slightly off the pace. Both the Samsung and the other Phison drives crack the 80MB/s barrier.

Meanwhile, if you are wondering how much of the main NAND memory PNY allows for high-performance SLC cache, our testing indicates the dynamic allocation can go as high as 300GB, which should be enough for most needs.

For the record, you can have the PNY XLR8 CS3140 without the beefy heatsink, but it’s barely any cheaper than this variant. So, it doesn’t fix this drive’s main problem, which is the price tag. It’s a good SSD—just that you can have something else just as good for quite a bit less cash.