PNY XLR8 CS3040 1TB SSD Review

The PNY XLR8 CS3040 comes in a compact box with an image of the drive on the front, along with the drive’s capacity on the top right-hand corner. Under the drive image, we find the read and write sequential speeds (5,600MB/s reads, 4,300MB/s writes) along with the drive’s warranty length. The rear of the box has a very small product info panel but most of the back is taking up by multilingual marketing information.

PNY sent us the heatsink version of the XLR8 CS3040 to review which has a chunky extruded aluminium heatsink weighing in at 45g covering the entire PCB. It's a two-part design with the heatsink itself connecting to a cradle that holds the drive via six tiny screws. To access the drive it's just a matter of undoing the six screws and very gently easing out the top part of the heatsink, although you do have to persuade the thermal pads that PNY are using, to let go of the drive.

The 1TB version of the XLR8 CS3040 is built on a dual-sided M.2 2280 format. One side of the PCB holds two 256GB 96-Layer 3D TLC NAND packages (coded TABBG65AWV), the Phison PS5016-E16 controller and a 512MB DDR4-2666 SK hynix (H5AN4G8NBJR-UHC) cache chip. The other side of the board holds another two 96-Layer NAND packages and a second cache chip.

Phison’s PS5016-E16 was the world’s first PCIe Gen4 x4 controller. Built on a 28nm process using a 32-bit ARM Cortex R5 processor, the 8-channel PS5016-E16 supports 3D and QLC NAND at a maximum speed of 800MT/s per channel.

It supports Phison’s 4th generation LDPC ECC engine to protect data and also features integrated End-to-END data protection. Security is further enhanced with support for TCG, Opal 2.0, Pyrite, Sanitize and Crypto Erase technologies.

PNY's management utility for SSDs is the PCIe Toolbox. It might not be as bling loaded as some of its competitors but all the basics are covered including firmware updates and secure erase but there isn't any data migration tool built in.

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