PNY Elite 960GB External SSD Review

1. Introduction2. PNY Elite 960GB3. ATTO/CrystalDiskMark/AS SSD4. Backup / Restre5. Throughput 6. Real Life File Transfers7. Closing Thoughts8. View All Pages

When we reviewed the PNY Pro Elite external drive we commented on how small it was… well, PNY have managed to make the Elite is even smaller. A sleek aluminium design, it measures just 60 x 36 x 9mm and weighs in at just 50g. The drive is small enough to get lost in even the smallest pocket.

Available in three capacities, 240GB, 480GB and 960GB, the Elite uses a USB 3.1 Gen1 interface. Unfortunately, PNY doesn’t state what controller or which NAND the drive uses in the specification sheet but the smart money would be on 3D TLC NAND.

The official Sequential performance figures for the 960GB drive are up to 420MB/s for reads and writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn’t reach those maximum figures for reads, the review drive producing a figure of 303MB/s. However, when it comes to ATTO writes, the drive bettered the official figure at 441MB/s. Switching over to the AS SSD benchmark we got a Sequential read figure of 418MB/s, confirming the official figure, but the write figure of 358MB/s was well shy of the official rating of the drive.

In our real-life file transfer tests, the drive topped 400MB/s on a number of occasions when transferring the data from an SDD to the Elite, with the fastest speed being 419MB/s when dealing with the 100GB data file. Coming back the other way, the fastest speed we saw was the 375MB/s from the 3D Print file folder transfer.

We found the 960GB PNY Elite on Argos.co.uk for £119.99 (inc VAT) HERE.

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Pros

• Very small format.
• Overall performance.

Cons

• USB cable a bit on the short side.
  
• 4K performance is a little disappointing.

KitGuru says: Tiny in stature, PNY's Elite 960GB external SSD provides a useful amount of storage combined with good performance.

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