PNY XLR8 CS3140 1TB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. PNY XLR8 CS3140 1TB3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark5. ATTO Disk Benchmark6. AS SSD7. 128KB Sequential Performance8. 4K Random Read v QD Performance9. 4K Random Write v QD Performance10. 4K 70/30 Mixed Performance11. 4K Random Performance QD1-QD812. Throughput13. PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark14. Performance Stability15. Temperatures16. Real Life File Testing17. Closing Thoughts18. View All Pages

The PNY XLR8 CS3140 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. Underneath the drive image we find the read and write sequential speeds 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.

 
The chunky extruded aluminium heatsink covers the entire PCB, weighing in at 45g and connects to the cradle holding the drive via six tiny screws.

The 1TB version of the XLR8 CS3140 is built on a single-sided M.2 2280 format using a 12nm manufacturing process. Next to the PCIe connector is the Phison PS5018-E18 8-channel controller, next to which sits the 1GB DDR4-2666 SK hynix (H5AN8G6NCJR-VKC) cache chip. The rest of the PCB real estate is taken up by four 256GB packages of Micron 96-Layer 3D TLC NAND (labelled IA7BG64AIA).

Built on a 12nm process, the PS5018-E18 is Phison’s 2nd generation PCIe Gen4 controller. The 8-channel controller uses Triple ARM Cortex R5 CPUs together with a pair of CoXProcessor’s. It has an interface speed of up to 1,600MT/s per channel and supports the latest NVMe 1.4 specifications.

The E18 supports Phison’s 4th Gen LDPC engine and comes with End-To-End Data Path Protection. It supports AES 128/256bit hardware encryption and TCG & Opal 2.0, Pyrite, Sanitize and Crypto Erase technologies.

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