PNY CS2142 2 TB

[W1zzard]

Designed specifically for portable devices like the Valve Steam Deck, the PNY CS2142 SSD enables storage capacities of up to 2 TB for your gaming collection. Our comprehensive review delves into its performance, heat management, power usage, and other significant aspects.

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[Zareek]

Great review as always @W1zzard.

Personally, a PNY SSD would have to be virtually the last brand left on the shelf before I'd buy one. I personally had a horrible experience with PNY support many years ago, I don't remember the details of that. The nail in their coffin for me was about 19 or 20 years ago, and I remember a lot about that one. My brother bought a PNY branded GeForce Ti 4800, it came with a "Lifetime Warranty". Just under or over two years after he bought it, it crapped out. PNY refused warranty service because their definition of "Lifetime" was while the product was still manufactured, or something like that. Not a cheap video card at the time. Not impressed, more so by their scummy definition of Lifetime than anything else. Hopefully they've improved since then, but why risk it.

 

[Shou Miko]

@Zareek I personally feel that PNY is the customers OEM brand with the GTX and Quadro cards that you find based on reference design some with reference cooling others with a custom cooling solution.

Their SSDs I feel is up and down like a lot of brands that only source the products and they them manufactured not known like Crucial/Micron, Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung and SK Hynix which makes their own products. (I know all manufactures had their ups and downs).

 

[Chrispy_]

I'm not sure why 2230s are still so expensive. In the earlier days of NAND storage smaller drives necessitated using the premium, highest-capacity NAND and cheaper drives would use several of the older packages at a lower cost-per-capacity overall - which is why there was always a massive price premium on the most compact drives, unless you were willing to accept a reduced capacity.

These days, many manufacturers are using single NAND packages at all tiers because, at least up to capacities of 2TB, the dense, multi-layered, single-package NAND is cheaper to manufacture, cheaper logistically, cheaper to integrate, and allows manufacturers to consolidate to fewer designs.

So why are all 2230's still so much more expensive than 2280s? A 2230 drive is now essentially identical components to a 2280 drive but they simply move the NAND next to the controller rather than having 50mm of empty space on the PCB where they can put their label. A 2230 is more commonly sold in a tiny blister pack, rather than a carton, which saves on packaging and shipping. That extra PCB in the 2280 isn't exactly expensive but when manufacturing hundreds of thousands of these things it's still fibreglass and copper, which have non-trivial costs.

I guess it's good that 2230 is becoming more common. Perhaps boards will start to include multiple 2230 M.2 slots in place of one of the 2242/2260/2280/22110 slots rather than it being a size limited to portable devices, add-in cards, and rackmount servers. Due to PCIe lane shortages, it's not needed on ATX boards but certainly mATX and mITX could benefit from this, especially since SATA is being relegated to ultra-budget builds these days.

 

[Ferrum Master]

I'm not sure why 2230s are still so expensive.

Because of Steam Deck, Ally, Legion Go...

Nevertheless Ally and Go now have angled adapter brackets to use proper 2280 drives without any harm, Steam Deck requires cut out and custom cover... considering how storage is important, I would totally opt to mod the case.

 

[Chrispy_]

Because of Steam Deck, Ally, Legion Go...

Nevertheless Ally and Go now have angled adapter brackets to use proper 2280 drives without any harm, Steam Deck requires cut out and custom cover... considering how storage is important, I would totally opt to mod the case.

2230s have been around for far longer than the Steam Deck. I was buying 2230 SSDs for ultraportables from Dell, HP, Microsoft Surface devices over a decade ago, and some of them still use 2230 (or 2242 in the case of Lenovo) in new releases to this day.

GPD and Ayaneo were making portable gaming PCs a good few years before the Steam Deck made the format more mainstream, but in terms of volumes shipped, the sum total of all Valve, Asus, Lenovo, MSI, GPD and Ayaneo handhelds combined is still only a small slice of the overall M.2 2230 market. Their influence isn't zero, but it's unlikely to be particularly significant.

 

[Ferrum Master]

2230s have been around for far longer than the Steam Deck. I was buying 2230 SSDs for ultraportables from Dell, HP, Microsoft Surface devices over a decade ago, and some of them still use 2230 (or 2242 in the case of Lenovo) in new releases to this day.

GPD and Ayaneo were making portable gaming PCs a good few years before the Steam Deck made the format more mainstream, but in terms of volumes shipped, the sum total of all Valve, Asus, Lenovo, MSI, GPD and Ayaneo handhelds combined is still only a small slice of the overall M.2 2230 market. Their influence isn't zero, but it's unlikely to be particularly significant.

Aren't you mixing SATA ones way too much and exaggerating? Those gaming things sell, and much more they would have expected. It is the pure reason for price hike.

 

[Wirko]

I'm not sure why 2230s are still so expensive. In the earlier days of NAND storage smaller drives necessitated using the premium, highest-capacity NAND and cheaper drives would use several of the older packages at a lower cost-per-capacity overall - which is why there was always a massive price premium on the most compact drives, unless you were willing to accept a reduced capacity.

These days, many manufacturers are using single NAND packages at all tiers because, at least up to capacities of 2TB, the dense, multi-layered, single-package NAND is cheaper to manufacture, cheaper logistically, cheaper to integrate, and allows manufacturers to consolidate to fewer designs.

Hm. Have 2-terabyte 2280s with a single NAND package really become common lately? I have always assumed there must be some technical reason why 8-high die stacks are significantly cheaper than taller stacks, which is then reflected in the prices of SSDs (2 vs 4 vs 8 TB). But maybe things have changed.

 

[Chrispy_]

Aren't you mixing SATA ones way too much and exaggerating? Those gaming things sell, and much more they would have expected. It is the pure reason for price hike.

What does SATA or NVMe have to do with it? 2230 is a physical size standard, not a data transfer protocol standard!

Even though the handheld gaming PCs are doing well, the Microsoft Surface (which is just one of several brands of ultraportable using M.2 2230) is a $7Bn/year market segment. Microsoft's Surfaces aren't as successful as Dell/HP's ultraportable lineup, mainly because businesses prefer the larger OEMs to Microsoft, even so Microsoft Surface sells more units in a year than every handheld company's total sales figures to date, since they first started. Valve have sold just under 3 million Steam Decks ever, and they have about a 70% slice of the marketshare right now. That puts the market at no more than 5 million total devices, compared to Microsoft who sold 5.6 million Surface devices in 2023. Granted, not all of them will use 2230, but most of the tablet-format devices do.

Hm. Have 2-terabyte 2280s with a single NAND package really become common lately? I have always assumed there must be some technical reason why 8-high die stacks are significantly cheaper than taller stacks, which is then reflected in the prices of SSDs (2 vs 4 vs 8 TB). But maybe things have changed.

Pass, I've been buying a load of SN580's which are dirt cheap. This isn't my field of expertise though, perhaps WD are just stacking two 8Tbit NAND packages on top of each other?

Aren't there a load of 4TB PS5-certified drives now? They need to be single-sided and include DRAM since getting the required 7GB/s without HMB support is a big ask of DRAMless offerings. Can't imagine you'd get 6 chips on a 2280 so presumably they're 4 chip designs (controller, DRAM, 2xNAND)

 

[sLowEnd]

Expensive and QLC? Pass.

 

[ShogoXT]

The Visiontek DLX4 2230 uses Innogrit 5220 and TLC I think. It's a cheap contender.

Also the XPG GAMMIX S55 2230 just came out and advertises similar specs as well they tend to use similar types of available hardware.

 

[Ferrum Master]

What does SATA or NVMe have to do with it?

Because you mentioned over a decade, and that would mean older NGFF not m.2 really that in 2014 was in baby pampers.

While surfaces are there why most would need large storage for those, also those are mostly US, for Pr0n? Unlike Gaming that uses storage a lot, also ain't region locked... there are around 3-4m Steam Decks alone already... Near 1m Allies... + the other bunch in like ~2 years.

 

[Chrispy_]

Because you mentioned over a decade, and that would mean older NGFF not m.2 really that in 2014 was in baby pampers.

While surfaces are there why most would need large storage for those, also those are mostly US, for Pr0n? Unlike Gaming that uses storage a lot, also ain't region locked... there are around 3-4m Steam Decks alone already... Near 1m Allies... + the other bunch in like ~2 years.

Absolute nonsense, where are you pulling this data from?!

M.2 has been around in NMVe form for since the z97/X99 days in 2011. Dell, HP, and Microsoft were launch partners for it in mobile design wins,
Native NVMe support was a big selling point for Windows 8, preview releases with NVMe support being available at the tail end of 2011 in preview releases, launched worldwide in 2012.

The last time I saw an older mSATA bare-PCB drive was in a windows 7 laptop around from 2010-2011. 1st Gen Core M or whatever Intel was branding Core2Duo Mobile as, I think. They seem pretty rare to me because I think most vendors went from SATA 2.5" to M.2 directly, very few making the jump from 2.5" SATA to mSATA. Even back in 2012, I bought plenty of M.2 NVMe storage back in 2013/2014 because Microsoft and Dell weren't shy about locking larger SSDs to higher spec devices with expensive i7 CPUs and overkill, battery-life-nuking, high-dpi screens. I was buying the entry level models with i3s and i5s and swapping out the insufficient 128GB storage even in 1st & 2nd gen Surface Pros.

 

[Wirko]

Absolute nonsense, where are you pulling this data from?!

M.2 has been around in NMVe form for since the z97/X99 days in 2011. Dell, HP, and Microsoft were launch partners for it in mobile design wins,
Native NVMe support was a big selling point for Windows 8, preview releases with NVMe support being available at the tail end of 2011 in preview releases, launched worldwide in 2012.

The last time I saw an older mSATA bare-PCB drive was in a windows 7 laptop around from 2010-2011. 1st Gen Core M or whatever Intel was branding Core2Duo Mobile as, I think. They seem pretty rare to me because I think most vendors went from SATA 2.5" to M.2 directly, very few making the jump from 2.5" SATA to mSATA. Even back in 2012, I bought plenty of M.2 NVMe storage back in 2013/2014 because Microsoft and Dell weren't shy about locking larger SSDs to higher spec devices with expensive i7 CPUs and overkill, battery-life-nuking, high-dpi screens. I was buying the entry level models with i3s and i5s and swapping out the insufficient 128GB storage even in 1st & 2nd gen Surface Pros.

In the early years of M.2, M.2 SATA SSDs (or free slots) were also often seen in notebooks, right?

 

[chrcoluk]

I think PNY's media team needs to be in sync with their commercial team, even if the review makes people want this product, I can only find it in Australia lol. Approx 300 AUD.

Which is approx 200USD for 2TB.

I'm not sure why 2230s are still so expensive. In the earlier days of NAND storage smaller drives necessitated using the premium, highest-capacity NAND and cheaper drives would use several of the older packages at a lower cost-per-capacity overall - which is why there was always a massive price premium on the most compact drives, unless you were willing to accept a reduced capacity.

These days, many manufacturers are using single NAND packages at all tiers because, at least up to capacities of 2TB, the dense, multi-layered, single-package NAND is cheaper to manufacture, cheaper logistically, cheaper to integrate, and allows manufacturers to consolidate to fewer designs.

So why are all 2230's still so much more expensive than 2280s? A 2230 drive is now essentially identical components to a 2280 drive but they simply move the NAND next to the controller rather than having 50mm of empty space on the PCB where they can put their label. A 2230 is more commonly sold in a tiny blister pack, rather than a carton, which saves on packaging and shipping. That extra PCB in the 2280 isn't exactly expensive but when manufacturing hundreds of thousands of these things it's still fibreglass and copper, which have non-trivial costs.

I guess it's good that 2230 is becoming more common. Perhaps boards will start to include multiple 2230 M.2 slots in place of one of the 2242/2260/2280/22110 slots rather than it being a size limited to portable devices, add-in cards, and rackmount servers. Due to PCIe lane shortages, it's not needed on ATX boards but certainly mATX and mITX could benefit from this, especially since SATA is being relegated to ultra-budget builds these days.

Different market segment. Now days so many products dont resemble manufacturing costs. I see kitchen bins that look like they cost 50p to make being sold for £50 on Amazon e.g.

Even 20 years ago when the problem wasnt as bad, the manufacturing company I worked for, the production cost was approximately 16% of the shelf price.

 

[Chrispy_]

In the early years of M.2, M.2 SATA SSDs (or free slots) were also often seen in notebooks, right?

Yep.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it felt like desktops were a couple of years behind laptops in mainstream M.2 adoption and also supporting NVMe in all M.2 slots. Even as recently as Ryzen 1st Gen there were motherboards (I remember Asus and Asrock B350 boards in particular) that had only one M.2 NVMe slot and the second (and/or third) M.2 were SATA-only.

 

[Shou Miko]

What does SATA or NVMe have to do with it? 2230 is a physical size standard, not a data transfer protocol standard!

Even though the handheld gaming PCs are doing well, the Microsoft Surface (which is just one of several brands of ultraportable using M.2 2230) is a $7Bn/year market segment. Microsoft's Surfaces aren't as successful as Dell/HP's ultraportable lineup, mainly because businesses prefer the larger OEMs to Microsoft, even so Microsoft Surface sells more units in a year than every handheld company's total sales figures to date, since they first started. Valve have sold just under 3 million Steam Decks ever, and they have about a 70% slice of the marketshare right now. That puts the market at no more than 5 million total devices, compared to Microsoft who sold 5.6 million Surface devices in 2023. Granted, not all of them will use 2230, but most of the tablet-format devices do.


Pass, I've been buying a load of SN580's which are dirt cheap. This isn't my field of expertise though, perhaps WD are just stacking two 8Tbit NAND packages on top of each other?

View attachment 341299

Aren't there a load of 4TB PS5-certified drives now? They need to be single-sided and include DRAM since getting the required 7GB/s without HMB support is a big ask of DRAMless offerings. Can't imagine you'd get 6 chips on a 2280 so presumably they're 4 chip designs (controller, DRAM, 2xNAND)

TPU actually have a list of compatible PS5 SSD's in the ssd database not 100% sure if it's up-2-date but I just know all of the SSD's ain't available world-wide sadly like Sabrent they ain't available where I am now and needs to be imported from other countries in the eu which makes them more pricey than Kingston, Seagate and WD.

SSD Database PS5 Compatible: https://www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/filter/?capacity=8&capacityRange=H&dram=1&ps5=1

 

[Ferrum Master]

Absolute nonsense, where are you pulling this data from?!

Because your timeline is offset, doesn't hold a candle. X99 launched in late 2014.

The early Laptop M.2 most were SATA only, as there were no spare pcie lanes. It didn't take off in mainstream for years, simply because conventional 2.5inch drives offered more space and were cheaper and available. The Intel push(read blackmail) of Optane Cache forced to wire a proper M.2 slots and made some consistency across board designs for laptops. Mid 2017? Before only flagship tier has them, not mainstream(It also apllies to desktop chipsets). The heck T480 Thinkpad(2018) used a weird adapter in 2.5 SATA bay to have pcie M.2 slot it was still transistioning and nobody was in a hurry. It was not that many years ago. Thus I suspect you mixed in mSATA drives in that indeed were much earlier and no argueing about that. Intel even had SSD cache technolgy for Z68.

You are right, even modern devices has a large disparity what really the M.2 supports. SATA/PCIE2x or 4X or Gen3/4/5... it very device specific as PCIE lanes are simply scarce and not enough, the thing still remains actual even in 2024.

Nevertheless... 2230 was obscure outside Surfaces, basically rendering it to US/Canada only. The whole other world saw them very rarely.

 

[Chrispy_]

Because your timeline is offset, doesn't hold a candle. X99 launched in late 2014.

The early Laptop M.2 most were SATA only, as there were no spare pcie lanes. It didn't take off in mainstream for years, simply because conventional 2.5inch drives offered more space and were cheaper and available. The Intel push(read blackmail) of Optane Cache forced to wire a proper M.2 slots and made some consistency across board designs for laptops. Mid 2017? Before only flagship tier has them, not mainstream(It also apllies to desktop chipsets). The heck T480 Thinkpad(2018) used a weird adapter in 2.5 SATA bay to have pcie M.2 slot it was still transistioning and nobody was in a hurry. It was not that many years ago. Thus I suspect you mixed in mSATA drives in that indeed were much earlier and no argueing about that. Intel even had SSD cache technolgy for Z68.

You are right, even modern devices has a large disparity what really the M.2 supports. SATA/PCIE2x or 4X or Gen3/4/5... it very device specific as PCIE lanes are simply scarce and not enough, the thing still remains actual even in 2024.

Nevertheless... 2230 was obscure outside Surfaces, basically rendering it to US/Canada only. The whole other world saw them very rarely.

And the Surface Pros launched in 2012, By Surface Pro 3 in 2014 they'd all made the switch to M.2 2230/2242 drives. Dell were a little slower, HP and Acer were a little quicker.
Or did you not read the post where I said it felt like desktops lagged mobile by 2-3 years?

You're trying to argue that M.2 2230 didn't exist in significant numbers before the Steam Deck and Ally came on the scene, two years ago, and I told you that no, it's been popular in laptops and tabletPCs for "over a decade". In a classic straw-man fallacy, you're now trying to pin down that statement to exactly a decade or something, bickering about whether it was 9, 10, 11, or 12 years ago.

I'm not really sure what your end goal is, other than to argue for the sake of argument.

 

[Ferrum Master]

By Surface Pro 3

Surface Pro 3 uses a mSATA drive.... you are mixing things up again. Okay... relax.

 

[Wirko]

Aren't there a load of 4TB PS5-certified drives now? They need to be single-sided and include DRAM since getting the required 7GB/s without HMB support is a big ask of DRAMless offerings. Can't imagine you'd get 6 chips on a 2280 so presumably they're 4 chip designs (controller, DRAM, 2xNAND)

I just checked a few reviews and it's actually quite common to see a single-sided 4TB SSD with 4+1+1 chips. Or used to be.
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus
Kingston KC3000

 

[Chrispy_]

I just checked a few reviews and it's actually quite common to see a single-sided 4TB SSD with 4+1+1 chips. Or used to be.
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus
Kingston KC3000

Interesting, those are double-sided, perhaps I misunderstand the PS5 requirements. I'm also not seeing many 2TB single-package offerings, so I guess that means 1TiB NAND chips are still the norm then.

I wonder if WD is stacking chips, or have just phased out 1TiB chips ahead of Micron/Samsung and are moving to 2TiB as fast as possible?

 

[AleXXX666]

why not for laptops? there are ultrabooks who likes smallish ssds... who cares about gaming bs which will cost like a proper laptop...