PNY XLR8 CS2211

PNY XLR8 CS2211 - Introduction 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. PNY XLR8 CS2211 - Specifications and Features PNY XLR8 CS2211 - A Closer Look The exterior of the PNY XLR8 CS2211's shipping container is rather interesting. While it may not be any larger than the typical 2.5" form-factor SSD shipping container it is rather attention getting. Some of this is because of the large full color image of the PNY XLR8 CS2211 that is on the front, but mostly it is the black and white color scheme that will help it stand out when on store shelves. In either case it is a pretty looking box. When you open up this shipping container you will see that PNY has not opted for the bog-standard plastic clamshell packaging / protective inner case. Instead you will find the PNY XLR8 CS2211 nestled in the middle of a lot of soft foam and ensconced in a anti-static bag. This last bit is getting harder and harder to find and it is nice to see that PNY is taking Electro-Static 'shock' damage seriously. We just all SSDs still came with this extra level of protection. Moving on the PNY XLR8 CS2211 itself is an incredibly striking and attractive looking SSD. Instead of the boring silver that seems to have become all the rage with most manufactures PNY has actually taken the time to paint it a nice flat black. This flat/matte black does contrast nicely with the large sticker that covers nearly the entirety of the top of this drive. Equally impressive is PNY has not only included a 2.5mm adapter bracket (so this 7mm Z-height drive can be properly installed in 9.5mm enclosures) but the dark gray does further accentuate the looks of this drive. Put simply this is one pretty looking drive. However, looks are all well and fine but most people are much more concerned with how a drive performs rather than how it looks. By cracking open the case (and voiding the warranty) consumers will find a very well laid out PCB that is about 3/4" the length of the interior space. While we would have liked to have seen a full length PCB this 3/4 length is very common with PHISON drives. Put another way it really does not matter. What may matter however is the fact that PNY has not included any heat pads for the various components. This is a lost opportunity as it would have turned the all metal chassis into a large heatsinks. In testing and extended use the drive never did get hot so this will not concern most people. However, if you live in a extremely hot climate you may want to consider active cooling so as to ensure the drive does not get too hot. Taking a closer look you can see that PNY has opted for eight 128Gbit Toshiba Toggle Mode NAND ICs. These ICs are some of the best to be found on the market and have powered many 'enthusiast' solid state drives since their inception. Backstopping this excellent NAND and controller is a DDR3 256Mb Kingston branded RAM IC. While PNY could have included a second RAM IC only the largest 960GB model really needs that big a RAM buffer. Before moving on the PHISON S10 controller does require a bit of explanation as this controller is rather unique in how it does things. Firstly, it is a quad-core based design that allocates the majority of these cores for internal house cleaning and only a minority for real time requests. This is radically different than most controllers which simply use spare processing cycles on a catch as catch can basis for internal house cleaning. This is why the PHISON S10 can boast such great extended performance. The only downside is that in short burst synthetic tests the results will appear lower than some of the competition as they literally use 100% of the core's cycles for I/O requests. As such this drive is a grower not a shower. PNY XLR8 CS2211 - Testing Methodology The reasons to purchase a high performance storage device are as varied as the consumers who purchase them. For some application load time is the deciding factor in their purchasing decision. For others it is Virtualized Operating System performance. For others still it is game load times. For others still it is to shave a .1 of second off their synthetic test scores so as to climb ever higher in the online rankings that various sites host. With such a wide variety of criteria it behooves us to use as wide and varied a list of testing protocols as possible. As such we have used a blend of synthetic and real world benchmarks, as well as custom recorded real world game benchmarking. For custom game play we have chosen f popular titles: Borderlands 2, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Saints Row 3. These games should give a good overview of the potential performance a given storage device will offer in real world game centric scenarios. For game load times testing we have chosen games which are clearly not Internet, GPU, RAM or CPU bottlenecked. The system was cold restarted in between each load to make sure no data saved in the GPU’s ram could influence load times. As with all tests all games were run four times and an average rounded the nearest second is recorded as the official result. For the Call of Duty: Ghosts we timed the level load time for the map called Into the Deep in the single player game. This level was chosen as it contains a large map and loads a lot of data from the storage device to the GPU. For Borderlands 2 we have recorded the time it takes to fast travel from Sanctuary map to Oasis. Oasis is the beginning of the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty DLC. This was chosen as it not only is a special level not included in the original Borderlands 2 game and thus contains additional data which should slow the load of this special map. For Saints Row 3 (labelled ‘SR3’ in the chart) we have recorded the load time from a specific save game. The game was saved just at the end of the ‘Shaundi saved’ version of “Three Way Ending” but before the cut scene. This was chosen as the game not only loads the Three Way Ending data but also the next level “Gangsta’s in Space” DLC level. For synthetic tests we used a combination of the ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS-SSD, Crystal Disk Benchmark, HDTach, HD Tune, and IOMeter. For real world (non-gaming orientated) testing we have used OS startup, Adobe Photoshop, VMWare, and data transfer times. For data transfer we timed how long a single 30GB rar file took to copy to and then from the devices. We also used 15gb of small files (from 100kb to 200MB) with a total 36,000 files in 1200 subfolders. All tests were run 4 times and average results are represented. To ensure optimum performance in between each test run the device was sanitary erased. Main Test System Processor: Intel i7 5930K Memory: 32GB (4x8GB) Crucial Ballistic Elite Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth X99 Cooling: Noctua U12S SSD: 1x Intel 750 1.2TB NVMe SSD Power Supply: Corsair AX860i Monitor: Dell U2714H OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 PNY XLR8 CS2211 - HD Tune Benchmarks Read Bandwidth For this benchmark, HD Tune Pro was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these storage devices. We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and thus we no longer included it. The most important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem. Write Performance For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have. PNY XLR8 CS2211 - ATTO Disk Benchmark The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drives read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second. As expected the combination of excellent Toggle Mode NAND with a modern multi-core controller is a winning one and ATTO just underscores this. PNY XLR8 CS2211 - Crystal DiskMark Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5 and size at 100MB. PNY XLR8 CS2211 - AS-SSD AS-SSD is designed to quickly test the performance of your drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and small 4K read/write speeds as well as 4K file speed at a queue depth of 6. While its primary goal is to accurately test Solid State Drives, it does equally well on all storage mediums it just takes longer to run each test as each test reads or writes 1GB of data. In and out of RAID this drive has performance to burn. It really is amazing how far your money goes these days in the SSD marketplace! PNY XLR8 CS2211 - IOMETER: File Server Test To test each drive we ran 6 test runs per device (1,4,16,64,128,256 queue depth) each test having 8 parts, each part lasting 10 min w/ an additional 20 second ramp up. The 6 subparts were set to run 100% random, 75% read 25% write; testing 512b, 4k,8k,16k,32k,64k size chunks of data. When each test is finished IOMeter spits out a report, in that reports each of the 6 subtests are given a score in I/Os per second. We then take these 8 numbers add them together and divide by 6. This gives us an average score for that particular queue depth that is heavily weighted for file server usage. By dedicating a full core to internal house cleaning the PHISON S10 based XLR8 CS2211 may lack performance at shallow queue depths but it more than makes up for it once the queue depths get more realistic. This goes double for RAID-1 configurations as the demands are nicely spread across both controllers. This is not something we can say about all SATA controllers… and is one of the reasons we like the PHISON S10 so much. PNY XLR8 CS2211 - System Boot Time When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. While all the other tests were run with a Windows 7 operating system, this particular test uses another older test bed's “day to day” OS (copied over to our new testbed) which has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up. PNY XLR8 CS2211 - Real World Data Transfers No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter is, it cannot really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. To this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 30.00GB contiguous file, then a folder containing 1200 subfolders with a total 36,000 files varying in length from 200mb to 100kb (15.00 GB total). Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found. Good boot time… check. Good data transfer speed… check. Excellent RAID performance… double check. What more could you ask for from a SATA solid state drive?! PNY XLR8 CS2211 - Load Time Benchmarks ADOBE CS6 LOAD TIME Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible! VMWare Load Time Performance VMWare is a powerful application which allows users the ability to run a virtualized Operating System from inside their main OS. This program is not only processor and RAM intensive but puts significant load on the storage subsystem with deep, heavy read/write IO requests to the drive. To help give you a general idea on the performance improvements from running a RAM Drive we have timed the time it takes to load XP SP3 from inside VMWare. For those who need a drive that can handle demanding scenarios the PNY XLR8 CS2211 should be right up your alley! Borderlands 2 Load time For Borderlands 2 we have recorded the time it takes to fast travel from Sanctuary map to Oasis. Oasis is the beginning of the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty DLC. This was chosen as it not only is a special level not included in the original Borderlands 2 game and thus contains additional data which should slow the load of this special map. CoD: Ghosts Load time For the Call of Duty: Ghosts we timed the level load time for the map called Into the Deep in the single player game. This level was chosen as it contains a large map and loads a lot of data from the storage device to the GPU. Saints Row 3 Load time For Saints Row 3 (labelled ‘SR3’ in the chart) we have recorded the load time from a specific save game. The game was saved just at the end of the ‘Shaundi saved’ version of “Three Way Ending” but before the cut scene. This was chosen as the game not only loads the Three Way Ending data but also the next level “Gangsta’s in Space” DLC level. These numbers are everything anyone looking for a moderately priced SATA based drive could hope for. Put another way this drive series – once again – easily justifies its rather frugal asking price. PNY XLR8 CS2211 - Partial and Full Drive Performance While it is important to know how a drive will perform under optimal conditions, more realistic scenarios are just as important. Knowing how drive will behave when partially or even nearly full than when it is empty is very important information to know. To quickly and accurately show this crucial information we have first filled the drive to 50% capacity and re-tested using both synthetic and real world tests. After the completion of this we then re-test at 75% and 90% of full capacity. Synthetic Test Results For our synthetic testing we have opted for our standard VMWare test. Real World Results For a real world application we have opted for our standard Adobe CS6, and Saints Row 3 tests. Thanks to its dedicated core the PHISON S10 controller proves exactly why it grabbed so much attention when it first landed…. and when you add in excellent NAND to the equation the PNY XLR8 CS2211's results do speak for themselves! PNY XLR8 CS2211 - Performance Summary and TL;DR In an effort to make sorting through all the results as easy as possible we have combined the results all of all the test results into an easy to digest summary format. By comparing this drive to similar products in all the various tests you will be able to easily find the result(s) you are interested in, see the improvement and decide if this model is worth the investment. PNY really did put a lot of thought and effort into the XLR8 CS2211 design and it shows. Everything from its good read performance to its good write performance screams consistency to those who know what to look for. Score Card and Summary Performance: 38 out of 40. What this drive may lack in synthetic tests it more than makes up for real world performance. Put simply the PHISON S10 is a controller built with long term performance in mind. To us that is a good thing and why the PNY XLR8 CS2211 can boast such great full drive performance numbers. Technological Innovation: 10 out of 20 This is one area PNY actually wanted to avoid as the CS2211 does not push the boundaries and instead takes the more tried and true approach to SSD design. With that being said it is an excellent example of what the PHISON S10 controller, which is no slouch when it comes to innovation, can do as PNY did not cut any corners on the NAND they chose! Build Quality & Warranty: 19 out of 20 While we would have preferred to have seen a full length PCB and heat pads for the ICs this drive is built to very high standard. The same goes for the four year warranty that is a full 33% longer than the industry standard of 3 years. Value: 18 out of 20 Due in a large part to its great long term performance this drive truly is a fantastic value in and out of RAID configurations. We do however have to deduct a point for no 3.5" adapter plate, and another for a four instead of five year warranty. Final Score: 85 out of 100 This drive's combination of excellent performance at a very reasonable price is what is sure to make it a favorite for system builders and knowledgeable consumers. Brilliant stuff! PNY XLR8 CS2211 - Closing Statement While we have not hidden our personal preference for this series the numbers do speak for themselves. There is no need to put things in perspective. There is no need to praise its overall value. There is even no need to point out how much performance this drive series has to offer. Instead all we need do is point to the across the board results to show why we have become fond of this series over the past couple months. We do however feel it necessary to explain exactly how the PNY XLR8 CS2211 is able to do all this and why it quickly became one of our more favorite SSD in recent months. Put simply PNY took the time to do things right. They did not rush on to any bandwagons, they did not rush to be the first on the market with a new controller. They did not even try to win 'Internet points' by jumping on any fads. Instead they took the time to judge the merits of the various controllers offered today and choose the one that offered the best blend of performance, value, and stability. The PHISON S10 controller is a rather impressive controller in that it does things differently. Instead of dedicating CPU cycles to internal housekeeping, it dedicates multiple cores that’s sole job is to ensure that there is free NAND ready and waiting for random writes. Equally important is PNY took the time and spent the money on purchasing some of the best NAND available today. It may not be '3D' and instead planar (aka 2D) NAND but Toshiba's Toggle Mode NAND is some of the best available today. It may not be cheap, but its abilities more than make up for the added expense. This combination of excellent NAND with one of the best mainstream orientated SATA controllers available is why the PNY XLR8 CS2211 is such a marvelous drive. A drive that can easily hold its own against similarly priced Samsung, Crucial, Intel, and Toshiba/OCZ drives. As such we have no qualms in not only awarding this series our Excellence and Real Deal award as not every SSD out there is as flexible as this series. For this reason, we highly recommend putting this series on your short, short list of drives before making a final decision. They may not have a NAND manufacture backing but that is not to say they cut corners. Instead they have carefully created a SSD that is worthy of your time and hard earned money.

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