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

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.

Listed specifications are 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write, whereas our high write transfer speed of this test is a bit lower at 450MB/s.  This is not all that unusual for high capacity LSI SandForce SSDs where we trade just a bit of performance for that capacity.

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 XLR8 Pro, we have displayed testing using highly compressible data on the left, compared to that of incompressible on the right.

Crystal Diskmark provides some great teaching points for those new to solid state drives.  Firstly, it provides a visual representation of what we read on the previous page with respect to ‘SSD Testing and Performance Fluctuations’.  We can see this when examining the sequential and 512K write performance results of CDM while testing with incompressible data, as seen on the right.  As well, lower 4k random write scores are commonplace with such drives of this capacity.

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.

The AS SSD sequential read result of 500MB/s is great to see and we were a bit surprised to see higher 4K-64Thrd read IOPS than write; typically write IOPS will prevail with LSI SandForce based SSDs. Even more interesting, however, is the amazing speeds attained during the AS SSD Copy Benchmark, one of the few built in mechanisms of these tests that provides a simulated ‘true to life’ testing.  This result is one of the best we have seen from any SSD yet: