Introduction

PNY Technologies was founded in 1985, in New Jersey, USA. The company manufactures a variety of computer peripherals, including graphics cards, flash memory cards, USB drives and solid-state drives. The company is also a major manufacturer of NVIDIA graphics cards.



I've reviewed several PCI-Express 5.0 SSDs this year and one of my biggest criticisms was that these drives require serious cooling, which means vendors are bundling actively cooled thermal solutions with their drives. The problem is that all these models rely on a "dumb" cooler that's running at a fixed fan speed, with no RPM control or fan-stop capability when the drive is idle. PNY is finally addressing this with their CS3150 XLR8 PCIe Gen 5 solid-state-drive. Instead of a SATA or fan connector, their drive is using an internal USB header for connection with the host system. This not only ensures power delivery, it also provides a communication channel between PC and heatsink, so you can monitor and control the fans' operation via software. PNY is also including adjustable RGB on their drive, which is controlled by the same software.

Under the hood, you get the usual PCIe 5.0 set of components: Phison's E26 controller, paired with Micron's newest B58R 3D TLC NAND with 232-layers, rated for transfer rates up to 12 GB/s. As expected for a high-end drive, a DRAM cache chip is included, too.

Right now, the PNY CS3150 XLR8 is available as a 2 TB model only, for a price of $300+. A 1 TB variant will follow in a few weeks and PNY also has plans for a higher-capacity model, depending on demand, which will be announced at a later date. Besides the CS3150 XLR8 with ARGB, there's also a model without RGB lighting, which connects using a 4-pin fan connector (not USB). You also get to choose between a black and white color theme for all these drives. PNY includes a five-year warranty with the CS3150 XLR8 SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 5.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 4.0 x4.


PNY has installed an RGB illumination zone in the center of the drive that's fully software controllable.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips, a single DRAM cache chip is included, too.


Unlike other Gen 5 SSDs, PNY's SSD uses an internal USB header for connection with the rest of the system.


PNY's cooling solution uses a clamshell configuration that's supported by four screws, to ensure mounting pressure is good.


There's thermal pads on top and bottom of the SSD. Please note the little temperature sensor (marked red) that's peeking through the thermal pad, to make direct contact with the controller.


This is not your standard dumb heatsink design. PNY has placed a microcontroller in their cooler, which manages the RGB lighting, monitoring, fan control and USB host interface.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5026-E26 is Phison's first PCI-Express 5.0 controller. It is the company's current flagship with support for eight flash channels and NVMe 2.0, using an Arm Cortex design. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.


One Hynix DDR4-4266 chip provides a total of 4 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• M.2 drives are tested with a fan blowing on them; that is, except for the results investigating uncooled behavior on the thermal testing page.

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 600 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 80% of their capacity
• Partitions are properly aligned.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.