PNY XLR8 CS3040 1TB SSD Review

The CS3040 is the mainstream Gen4 sibling to the high-end CS3140 in PNY’s XLR8 gaming portfolio of SSD drives. It uses a combination of a Phison PS5016-E16 controller (the CS3140 uses the 2nd generation PS5018-E18) and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND.

The drive is available in four capacities, 500GB 1TB, 2TB and 4TB and in two versions; one aimed at desktop use with a well designed extruded aluminium heatsink and the other with just a straightforward product label aimed towards notebook users, compact PC designs and those who want to use the integrated heatsink/cooling technology of a motherboard. The heatsink versions have ‘HS' in the SKU number.

The only official performance figures we could find for the drive (on the spec sheet and box) are for sequential read/writes with not a trace of any random figures. The drive is officially rated as up to 5,600MB/s for reads and up to 4,300MB/s for writes.

When we tested the drive with the ATTO benchmark, we got figures of 5,210MB/s and 3,970MB/s for sequential read and writes respectively, both shy of the official maximums. However, using the compressible data test in CrystalDiskMark 6 we could indeed confirm the official sequential read rating with a test result of 5,640.7MB/s. The write result was still a little shy of the official maximum at 4,248.4MB/s. It was the same story with CrystalDiskMark 8, the best read result of 5,620.67MB/s confirming the official figures with the best write performance figure of 4,252.65MB/s a little way off the official maximum.

PNY doesn’t state any 4K random performance figures for the drive but in our tests, the best read/write IOPS figures we got from the drive was when we used the Peak Performance profile in CrystalDiskMark 8 which produced figures of 658,325.68 IOPS and 546,826.17 IOPS for reads and writes respectively.

We found the heatsink version of the 1TB PNY XLR8 CS3040 on Lambdatek for £170.83 (inc VAT) HERE.

Pros

• Overall performance.
• 5-year warranty.
• Heatsink option.

Cons

• 4K performance a little disappointing in some of our tests.
• Faces some serious competition.

KitGuru says: The XLR8 CS3040 is PNY's drive to take on the mainstream Gen4 market, which might be a fairly new sector but is already very competitive. The fact that PNY offers the drive in two versions, one with a heatsink and one without gives them two bites at the cherry.

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