PNY XLR8 Pro 480GB SSD Review – Capacity, Price and Performance

Our SSD review today examines the new PNY XLR8 Pro 6Gbps SSD and one might think that, after reviewing SSDs for six years and having somewhere in the area of 100TB of SSD storage in the office, receiving a 480GB SSD in the mail wouldn’t be exciting.

In that, you would be wrong.  As much as getting such an SSD in your hands would be exciting for anyone, the truth is that I race to the front each and every time a courier shows up.  It’s in the blood I think. I truly love SSD technology.

Add to that the fact that we are reviewing the second line of a new SSD family from a company that we hadn’t worked with prior and it is a win win all around.  Our first review from PNY was on the Prevail Elite, the first consumer accessible SSD using eMLC memory which earned our Editor’s Choice Award and still has THE BEST pricing available for any similar SSD of that build.  If you want endurance, the Prevail Elite simply can’t be beat and if you ever sought that golden recommendation from a reviewer, this would definitely be my choice.

Today, the PNY XLR8 Pro we are reporting on has your typical high end memory, rather than eMLC that we saw in the PNY Prevail Elite, is the first ‘LSI SandForce Driven’ 480GB that we have reviewed and it has a five year warranty.  It is available in capacities of 120, 240 and 480GB and performance is listed at 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write with 85,000 IOPS at low 4k random write aligned disk access.

The XLR8 Pro has a five year warranty but one must register their product with PNY for that additional two years above the standard three year warranty. Pricing can be found at $459.99 but one must watch for stock as these SSDs seem to be going fast.

XLR8 PRO BUILD AND COMPONENTS

The PNY XLR8 Pro 480GB SSD exterior is of a thick metal construction and the weight is obvious in your hands.  The bottom plate is secured by four screws, one of which is covered by a security sticker as well as the branding label.

Once the exterior casing is removed, we find a green printed circuit board that contains the SandForce SF-2281 SATA 3 flash storage processor (FSP) and sixteen modules of Intel 25nm synchronous mlc NAND flash memory.  Prior to our last review of the PNY Prevail Elite SSD and its eMLC memory, synchronous memory could have been arguably considered the best ‘consumer accessible’ SSD memory available to date.

In total, there is 512GB of RAW storage capacity on this SSD (16×32), however, over provisioning and LSI SandForce firmware needs reduce this SSD to it’s advertised total of 480GB.  Formatting reduces it further yet, leaving the user with a total of 447GB of available storage.