PNY CS2111 SSD tested
PNY has mainly intended the CS2000 series for the gaming consumer. The case features a flaming tiger, which is especially effective in PCs with a window in the side panel. The CS2111 drives are available in various capacities from 240GB, 480GB and 960GB. The hardware is comparable to budget drives like Crucial’s BX100 and Transcend’s SSD370, but the PNY drive is a lot more expensive at the time of writing.
Pros
- Separate design
Cons
- Too expensive for BX100 equivalent
The American company PNY has released a few new SSDs in recent months, with the CS2000 series particularly intended for the gaming consumer. The case features a flaming tiger, which is especially effective in PCs with a window in the side panel. The CS2111 drives are available in various capacities, from 240, 480 and 960GB. The price per gigabyte is at the time of writing about 48 cents per GB, which is higher than real budget drives such as Crucial’s BX100 and Transcend’s SSD370. Samsung’s popular 850 Evo drives are between the budget drives and the CS2111 at a price of 42 cents per GB.
The hardware on board the SSDs is therefore quite average, with the exception of the memory. The controller is a somewhat budget-oriented SM2246EN from Silicon Motion. That is the same controller as in Transcend’s SSD370 and Crucial’s BX100 also uses that controller. The memory on board of the CS2111 is different; PNY has put the latest generation 16nm-mlc-nand from Micron in the drives. We have so far only tested that memory in Crucial’s BX100 series.
We tested the PNY CS2111, in the 480GB version, according to our standard test protocol for SSDs. The full results can be consulted in the bench-db, but for this short review we use a subset of those results. We compare the CS2111 with the Crucial BX100, which has almost identical hardware on board, and the Transcend SSD370, which combines the same controller with a generation older nand. We’re also including Samsung’s 850 Evo drive simply because it’s the most popular.
The Silicon Motion controller comes along reasonably well with reading, but with writing and random actions it lags considerably behind drives such as Samsung’s Evo. As expected, the three SM2246EN drives perform almost identically.
In the traces, the PNY drive achieves an excellent score for booting and the Home & Office test. Unfortunately, the drive cannot sustain that line in the Workstation and Gaming traces, but the CS2111 is still faster than its direct competitors.
Conclusion
In terms of appearance, the CS2111 is aimed at gamers and lovers of a visually attractive or at least different from other solid state drives. Inside, however, it is just a BX100, so a budget drive. The performance is also up to that, but unfortunately the price is not yet. Until the PNY drive reaches a more attractive price point, its performance will not be sufficient to justify its higher price point compared to the competition.