The PNY CS1311 and CS2211 SSD Review: MLC vs TLC at 15nm
by Billy Tallis on April 15, 2016 8:00 AM ESTMixed Random Read/Write Performance
The mixed random I/O benchmark starts with a pure read test and gradually increases the proportion of writes, finishing with pure writes. The queue depth is 3 for the entire test and each subtest lasts for 3 minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. As with the pure random write test, this test is restricted to a 16GB span of the drive, which is empty save for the 16GB test file.
The mixed random I/O performance of the CS2211 is a little above average for MLC drives, while the CS1311 is pretty much at par for a planar TLC drive.
Power draw on the mixed random test follows the same patterns we've been seeing: the slowest and smallest drive draws the least power, while the largest fastest drive draws the most. All of the PNY drives are in the average range for power consumption, and the MLC drives are significantly more efficient.
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It's typical for power consumption to increase over the course of this test while performance bottoms out somewhere in the middle. The biggest difference in character between the TLC and MLC drives from PNY is that the MLC drives get a huge boost in the all-writes last phase of the test, bringing their average score way up.
Mixed Sequential Read/Write Performance
The mixed sequential access test covers the entire span of the drive and uses a queue depth of one. It starts with a pure read test and gradually increases the proportion of writes, finishing with pure writes. Each subtest lasts for 3 minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The drive is filled before the test starts.
On the mixed sequential I/O test, PNY's drives range from slightly above average to second worst. The 240GB CS2211 in particular is underperforming a bit compared to its competition while the 480GB OCZ Trion 150 performs surprisingly well compared to the other TLC drives (including the 480GB CS1311).
Both of the CS2211s average lower power consumption than the CS1311s of the same capacity, while the slower 120GB CS1311 again comes in as the least power-hungry of the batch (though its efficiency is nothing praiseworthy).
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The key factor in the 120GB CS1311's low power consumption is its low performance on the pure-write phase of the test, which is an unsurprising result. The other CS1311s are large enough to deliver significantly higher performance on that part of the test, but they pay the cost in increased power draw.
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futrtrubl - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link
How is that not good enough? That's 3 years if you rewrite the ENTIRE drive EVERY DAY.Let's pick a long 9 year planned lifetime for a drive as you would probably want to upgrade by then for non-failure reasons. That means you could write 1/3 of the drive's capacity every day for those nine days. For a 256GB drive (somewhat on the small end now) that's 85GB every day. Or installing 2-3 AAA games every day!
bug77 - Sunday, April 17, 2016 - link
Well, on a modern OS you no longer control the amount of data being written. Automatic updates, indexing, metadata, restore points... the OS will write those whenever it wants to.If planar TLC was half the cost of MLC or V-NAND TLC, I may consider it. But since it's within 10-20%, I'd rather get the better drive.
doggface - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
The average laptop user writes 10-20gb a day. Even if you were double average you would still be safe as houses.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, April 21, 2016 - link
I have a modern OS on my laptop and have quite a bit of control over what does or doesn't get written to storage. For instance, there are no restore points, indexing is mine to manage as I see fit. I can pick when and what I want to update, and I haven't allocated a partition to swap (thank you Linux). You just have to exercise a bit of selectivity about which modern OS you decide to install.rarson - Monday, April 18, 2016 - link
In my experience, the average mechanical hard drive has a life of about 2 years. I see many of them fail before then, and most of the drives these that last over 5 years are already 8+ years old.I recently bought one of Seagate's 8TB archival drives and it started making some clicking noises right out of the box. It hasn't given me any problems yet, but it is a bit disconcerting to hear a click every couple minutes. Hard drives just don't last very long anymore, while my SSDs have been rock solid with everyday use. I would not install my operating system on a mechanical drive ever again. No reason to do so.
fire400 - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
i put windows XP on this 1311, and it's the fastest I've ever seen XP do anything, startup, tasks, and installing software and launching programs, faster than high end workstation systems on HDD's, since it's debut in 2001... loland yes, the XP OS is extremely stable because the 1311 takes care of garbage collection in the background.
burn tested it for several hours and days on end, it's perfect...
LB-ID - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
I can't imagine buying any PNY products in any event, but even more so given that the Samsung EVO is so much more bang and reliability for your buck.DigitalFreak - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
Every PNY device I've had, whether SD cards or video cards, has died prematurely. Absolute garbage.The_Assimilator - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
That's what the "XLR8" part stands for!TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
My pny 770s are going strong 2.5 years later. Also some of the coolest running 770s I've seen