PNY Prevail Elite SATA 3 SSD Review – Performance Meets eMLC Endurance And Consumer Value

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.46

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

The PNY Prevail Elite is not hitting the performance at smaller file sizes quite as fast as some of the newer SSDs we are seeing lately but read performance of 554MB/s and write performance of 526MB/s is right in line with specifications.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of highly compressible data (oFill/1Fill), or random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. In the PNY Prevail Elite, we have displayed testing using highly compressible data on the left, compared to that of incompressible on the right.

One thing that is always great to see is when the low 4k write performance exceeds the 100MB/s mark as we see here with the PNY Prevail Elite.  In comparison to the number of SSDs analyzed to date, very few have actually surpassed that ‘line in the sand’.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.6

Up until recently, AS SSD was the only benchmark created specifically for SSD testing and it uses incompressible data.  AS SSD, for the most part, gives us the ‘worst case scenario’ in SSD transfer speeds because of its use of incompressible data and many enthusiasts like to AS SSD for their needs. Transfer speeds are displayed on the left with IOPS results on the right.

AS SSD shows some decent numbers, especially when it comes to 4k-64Thrd IOPS performance, however, we have seen many SSDs boost that ‘Score’ result to over 1000 as of late.  The trade off, of course, is that none could brag about total life span as the Elite can. A recent trend with a few newer SSDs has also been to complete the AS SSD Copy Benchmark testing with consistent SATA 3 speeds and amazing total transfer times as we see here with the Elite: