We all love reading about and seeing bleeding edge devices in action. We all love the cutting edge performance they offer. We even all love the sheer joy of owning something few can ever justify. Sadly, that last part is critical to why the mainstream and entry level end of the spectrum outsells the bleeding edge version by a significant margin… as no one ‘loves’ the lack of value those bleeding edge models offer! That is why we here at RHR concentrate on the more mainstream options – as to us value is king.
Recently we had an opportunity to review a model that we personally feel is the epitome of value and jumped at the chance to show why we think it is such a great drive. For those who do not know us and our recommendations we are talking about none other than the PNY XLR8 CS2211 series of solid state drives. Specifically, the 480GB model and thanks two PNY we will be testing not only one but two of the XLR8 CS2211 480GB solid state drives.
This series quickly pinged our radar when first released and even more quickly became a favorite of ours for a few key reasons. Firstly, with nearly half a terabyte of capacity very few customers of ours would feel their OS drive was claustrophobically small. Next with an asking price of only $160 (USD), or 33 cents per Gigabyte, it also allows us the luxury of offering people RAID 0 configurations without breaking their budget.
Win a PNY 2.5″ 480GB SSD!
This however is only one small part of why it was chosen. The main reason is the NAND and controller combination it relies upon. Put simply the Toshiba 19nm Toggle Mode NAND with PHISON S10 controller is one of the best bang for your buck combinations going right. This pairing offers excellent real world performance, excellent full drive performance and excellent long term performance. Put another way the PHISON S10 with Toggle Mode NAND combination works together belies its reasonable asking price!
Lastly PNY have really stepped up their game when it comes to RMA and warranty. So on the off chance if things do go sideways within four years of purchase you know we will not be fighting the manufacturing over replacing a dead drive.
That is why we added the CS2211 to our building arsenal and toady we get to show you exactly what this drive in single and simple RAID 0 configurations can offer you. Then you can decide if you agree with our personal assessment or not.
