PNY CS2211 SSD Review (240GB/480GB)

Just last week we announced PNY’s latest SSD products for the new year, the CS1311 and CS2211. It just so happens that today we have some in our hands for review. The CS1311 is your basic, entry level SSD jam packed with TLC NAND for those looking for a cheap SSD upgrade from an HDD. As you may have noticed as of late, many companies have been following this trend to help push SSD adaptation to the masses, however, for enthusiasts and gamers, these lower performance SSDs are something which we avoid. For those of us who need more performance, the PNY CS2211 is a mainstream offering developed specifically for us, the gamer and enthusiast crowd. With a sleek design and great performance numbers on the spec sheet, the CS2211 should hold its own very well in today’s review. But, let’s not jump to any conclusions just yet, continue on as we poke and prod the new PNY CS2211 to see how it compares to the rest of the competition!

SPECIFICATIONS, PRICING, AND AVAILABILITY

The PNY CS2211 comes in a 7mm 2.5″ form factor and is available in three capacities: 240GB ($89.99), 480GB ($159.99), and 960GB ($309.99). Read speeds are rated for up to 565MB/s and writes for up to 540MB/s. In terms of IOPS the 480GB model can deliver up to 95K IOPS read/write while the 240GB model takes a slight hit in reads, delivering 87K IOPS.

The PNY CS2211 comes with a license for Acronis True Image to help ease the upgrade to an SSD. So, if you need to clone, it will be a painless transition. Furthermore, it features full end-to-end data path protection as well as ECC rated for up to 120 bits per 2K sector. SMART and secure erase capability is also supported as well as TRIM. When looking at power consumption it is rated for an average active consumption of 3.3W and 0.2W idle. Finally, the MTBF rating for this SSD is higher than its predecessor and is now rated for 2 million hours and it has a standardized 4-year warranty rather than the 2+2-year warranty where you needed to register for the extra two years in the past.

Finally, at this time, this SSD is not yet available for purchase, however, it will be available February 15th.

PACKAGING AND COMPONENTS

Just as in the past, the PNY CS2211 has very nice, premium packaging. All the important information is on the front and back. Inside we can see that on top of the Acronis True Image serial key and guide it comes with a 2.5mm spacer.

Rather than continue the fire or animal type design on this SSD PNY has chosen to go with a more simplistic grunge look, which we think looks very pleasing.

After we disassembled the SSD from its clamp shell case we could see what makes it tick. Inside is a Phison controller, Toshiba MLC NAND, and Nanya DRAM.

Overall, there are 8 NAND packages on the 240GB model and 16 on the 480GB model, thus this extra parallelism explains the slightly better write speeds of the larger model. The NAND is specifically 15nm Toshiba MLC. Each package is 32GiB in capacity, meaning that overall these drives employ 7% over provisioning from the factory. Once formatted, the available user capacity for storage is 223GB and 447GB respectively.

The DDR3L DRAM package is 256MB on the 240GB model and 512MB on the 480GB model and they operate at 800MHz. The Phison PS3110-S10-X is a 32-bit quad-core eight channel SATA III 6Gbps controller that has proven to be very robust. It has been used in many SSDs as of late and it should be interesting to see how this product compares to those we have tested before.