PNY XLR8 CS3040 1TB SSD Review

Rating: 8.0.

We recently reviewed PNY's latest M.2 NVMe drive aimed at the high-end section of the market, the Gen 4 XLR8 CS3140. Now it's the turn of a Gen 4 drive a little lower down on the XLR8 food chain – today we're looking at PNY's XLR8 CS3040, aimed at the mainstream market segment.

Just like the XLR8 CS3140, there are two versions of the drive; one with a large extruded aluminium heatsink aimed towards desktop users and one without, just with a product label better suited to compact PCs, notebooks or if you want to make use of any integrated drive cooling your motherboard may have. The XLR8 CS3040 has one more capacity option than its faster sibling in the shape of a 500GB entry-level model. The drive uses a combination of a Phison PS5016-E16 controller and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND.

All four drives in the range have the same 5,600MB/s Sequential read rating. The 2TB and 1TB (the drive we are reviewing here) have an official Sequential write speed of up to 4,300MB/s with the entry 500GB drive rated at up to 2,600MB/s and the 4TB flagship drive up to 3,900MB/s. There are no 4K random performance figures given on the specification sheet for the drive.

PNY quotes an 1800TBW endurance figure for the 1TB XLR8 CS3040 and PNY backs the drive with a 5-year warranty.

Physical Specifications:

• Usable Capacities: 1TB.
• NAND Components: 96-layer TLC NAND.
• NAND Controller: Phison PS5016-E16.
• Cache: 1GB DDR4-2666.
• Interface: PCIe Gen 4 x4, NVMe 1.3.
• Form Factor: M.2, 2280.
• Dimensions: 80 x 22 x 20mm.
• Drive Weight: 47g

Firmware Version: CS304130.

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