PNY LX3030 SSD: Incredible durability for twice the price

This PCIe 3 drive sustains long writes with the top performers and is rated for a staggering 27,000TBW per TB of capacity.

- JON L. JACOBI

PNY’s new LX3030 NVMe SSD isn’t for everyone. It’s marketed directly at Chia cryptocurrency plotting, a very high-bandwidth sustained write task. If you want some info on how much data Chia requires, you can find it here (fave. co/3E0aqao). But if your workload involves something similar, such as continuous largescale backup, video encoding, or anything else that involves writing lots and lots of data, it might also be of interest.

Why? The LX3030 is the fastest PCIe 3.0–based sustained writer we’ve tested and its TBW (TeraBytes that can be Written) ratings are astounding: 27,000TBW per 1TB of NAND. Seagate’s scorching-fast FireCuda 530 (fave.co/3vs8HYl) is rated for 1,250TBW per terabyte—a lot of data by normal standards, but shy one zero compared to the PNY’s rated durability.

The catch? When I say the LX3030 is not for everyone, I mean it: The 2TB version I tested is priced at $1,170—more than twice what the aforementioned FireCuda 530 costs. Gulp.

PRICE AND DESIGN

The rest of the LX3030 story is rather mundane. It’s a four-lane PCIe 3 drive in the standard 2280 (22 mm wide, 80 mm long) M.2 form factor. PNY was extremely tight-lipped about details. Peeling back the label, however, revealed a Phison PS5012-12ES-32 controller, eight unknown 3D NAND chips (I found no Web entry for the chip numbers), and two Kingston 1GB DRAM chips.