The PNY CS1311 and CS2211 SSD Review: MLC vs TLC at 15nm
by Billy Tallis on April 15, 2016 8:00 AM ESTRandom Read Performance
The random read test requests 4kB blocks and tests queue depths ranging from 1 to 32. The queue depth is doubled every three minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The test spans the entire drive, which is filled before the test starts. The primary score we report is an average of performances at queue depths 1, 2 and 4, as client usage typically consists mostly of low queue depth operations.
The random read performance of the CS1311 is surprising. The 120GB outperforms most other planar TLC drives, and the larger capacities clearly outperform the OCZ Trion 150. The performance of the CS2211 is mediocre by MLC standards but still significantly better than the planar TLC drives.
The PNY drives show a clear pattern to the power consumption: reading from more flash chips takes more power, and since read operations aren't much more power-hungry on TLC than MLC, the higher performance of MLC leads to higher power consumption.
 |
|||||||||
The 120GB CS1311 scales better in both power and performance than its larger counterparts, while the relation between the 240GB and 480GB is more typical. The CS2211 demonstrates significantly higher power consumption for the 480GB across the board for little performance benefit.
Random Write Performance
The random write test writes 4kB blocks and tests queue depths ranging from 1 to 32. The queue depth is doubled every three minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The test is limited to a 16GB portion of the drive, and the drive is empty save for the 16GB test file. The primary score we report is an average of performances at queue depths 1, 2 and 4, as client usage typically consists mostly of low queue depth operations.
On the random write test, the 120GB CS1311 again shows higher performance than its higher capacity counterparts, but by a very slim margin. The CS2211s are quite close in performance to each other and to other mid-range MLC drives. PNY's MLC drive sustains more than twice the throughput of their TLC drive.
Power consumption during random writes is very similar across all the PNY drives, showing that the higher per-operation power cost on TLC is roughly matched by the higher throughput of MLC.
 |
|||||||||
The CS1311 shows little to no performance scaling with higher queue depths, although power consumption does increase slightly. The CS2211 plateaus once the queue depth reaches eight.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
43 Comments
View All Comments
DanoSpumoni - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link
When 2TB SSDs drop below $200 then i'll bite... from the current trend it looks like thats only a couple years away maybe lesszodiacfml - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
It has been like that ever since they unleashed V-NAND drives. Despite being on top, I think they are selling them competitively to remove or not allow smaller players to enter.zepi - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
At least in Europe Samsung has priced itself out of the game completely. I've yet to see EVO ever even near the top of the GB per euro/£ list when I've been searching for drives. Usually Crucial seems to take to top stop and I've yet to see a reason buy anything else.Like now as I write I see 480GB BX200 being available for 97€ taxes included in amazon.de, cheapest 500GB EVO is 141€, so straight away +45% or something like that. I've yet to see it ever being even remotely competitive with sandisks or corsairs in Europe.
It still seems to sell well though being often in the top lists of many retailers.
DeepLake - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
Last i checked US prices for Samsung EVO were also very high. I dont know what other commenters are talking about. Are they ignorant or Samsung agents?BrokenCrayons - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
Thanks for the review. It's good to see SSD prices falling thanks to TLC and a standardized, inexpensive controller. I've been happy with the added capacity at a lower price point thanks to TLC flash. TLC performance behind budget controllers seems good enough now to make MLC SSDs a poor choice in a lot of desktop and laptop usage scenarios.haukionkannel - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
So true. They Are slover, but the prises are good.hansmuff - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
They make excellent game drives. With games coming in at 50GB at times, a 480 or 960GB TLC drive with so-so speeds is perfectly acceptable.bug77 - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
I would love to see the SSD price fall fir any reason but planar TLC :(The performance of planar TLC is not that big of an issue, but the reduced lifetime is.
LostWander - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
Is the reduced lifetime really that extreme? As far as I've seen it's still far better than anything you would get out of a conventional HDD. Adding in better general performance and it seems like less intensive applications (like a game or media storage drive) would still be perfectly acceptable for TLCbug77 - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
You get 3 years warranty at most (two years less than MLC/V-NAND TLC) and something like 1000 p/e cycles. Good enough for many things (music, videos), but not if you're writing a lot (e.g. a system drive or a game drive).And while TLC itself is not so bad (it's hardly worth it imho, because it's not much cheaper), if the trend continues we'll have some pretty crappy drives in our hands soon.