PNY XLR8 CS3140 1TB

Can PNY’s fat new SSD keep cool under pressure from its rivals?

- JEREMY LAIRD

SOME SSD MANUFACTURERS go into forensic detail when it comes to the speeds and feeds for their latest and greatest M.2 drive. But not PNY. The new PNY XLR8 CS3140, reviewed here in 1TB trim and also available with a tasty 2TB of storage, is a case in point.

No question, we know it’s a high-end model, with the quad-lane PCIe Gen 4 interface, claimed read speeds up to 7,500MB/s, proper TLC flash memory rather than cheap QLC chips, and that big, fat heat sink. Indeed, it’s faster on paper than both Sabrent’s Rocket 4 Plus and the Samsung 980 Pro, both of which are pegged at 7,000MB/s. It’s even a whisker ahead of the Adata XPG Gammix S70, which tops out at 7,400MB/s.

That kind of raw pace is also beginning to bump up against the theoretical 8GB/s limit of quad-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface. But as far as the details go, that’s about it. Okay, PNY also quotes sequential writes speeds, 5,650MB/s for this 1TB model and 6,850MB/s for the 2TB. But it conspicuously doesn’t list random access IOPS performance or much by way of configuration details.

What’s the controller chipset? How about write endurance? The XLR8 CS3140 comes with a five-year warranty, so you could argue the specifics of aspects such as write endurance are academic. But no matter, we can confirm the XLR8 CS3140 sports a Phison PS5018-E18 controller and four 256GB packages of Micron 96-Layer 3D TLC NAND.