Intro and Design
Ahhhh... PNY XLR8 series, how we love thee. Let us count the ways. While some may not consider PNY as the first name in gaming hardware, we've been absolutely blown away but their XLR8 line of products and the CS2211 480GB SSD is no exception. Not only has PNY been put on the map with their latest set of gear, they've actually cemented their position with aggressive features, pricing, and most importantly, performance in a sweet looking branding campaign.
Opening the packaging on a new SSD is always exciting and long gone are the large spinning drives in my gaming rig. Sadly, I have filled my 1TB SSD and so the CS2211 with 480 raw GB, I was ready to rock. Installation and formatting was a breeze and I had no issues whatsoever getting the drive installed or configured. Bam! We pulled some specs on the drive and while nothing fancy, we got an idea of what we were in for.
With the drive installed, the initial checks good, and a grin on our face, it was definitely time to put this little puppy through the ringer...
Performance
Yes, the drive is purty. Yes, it was very easy to install. No, I didn't have a single issue with any of it and in fact, it looks gorgeous in our gaming rig. So now, the true test. PERFORMANCE. If it's pretty but slow, who cares right? I'm happy to report, PNY blew us out of the water again. Using Crystal Bench, you can see we pulled off some extremely impressive numbers below.
As you can see, those sequential read and write rates just totally crushed a similarly priced SSD by almost 40 MB/s. That is a unreal performance and bang for the buck. This means extremely fast load times for games and our file copy tests were incredibly speedy as well. For gamers, this is about as good as it gets folks!
Value and Conclusion
At the time of writing, this drive retails for $139.99 and that is about what you'll pay on the street as well. Is it the cheapest 480GB SSD? Nope, but for the performance/price ratio, it's an extremely tempting offer, especially with the stellar PNY customer service and 4 Year (!) Warranty. That's right folks, it's a good time to be a gamer when you can install a ton o' games on a drive that is competitvely priced and is blazing fast. I may have just found my newest preferred SSD line... You can check out the full product specs and features at PNY's page here.
