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.
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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.
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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.
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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