PNY CS2130: Use That Empty NVMe Slot

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Is it QLC or TLC?



NVMe drives offer the perfect balance of size and performance. They attach directly to a slot on most modern desktop and laptop motherboards and leave no mess of cables for us to hide away in our builds. 

NVMe drive inserted into a motherboard

(Image credit: PNY)

PNY have just announced their latest range of M.2 2280 NVMe drives. Seen as an upgrade for users of SATA based SSD drives, the CS2130 range of drives provide an overall faster experience.

Coming in three capacities, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. These drives offer up to six times the performance boost over older SATA SSD, thanks to the PCIe Gen 3 x4 interface.

But only the 2TB model offers the fastest sequential read speed of 3500MB/s and 3000MB/s sequential write. The 1TB model comes in at 3500MB/s sequential read and 1800MB/s sequential write. Which is no slouch for general desktop applications, but may hinder the performance of tasks requiring a large number of sequential writes. Sadly the 500GB model only offers up to 925MB/s sequential write speed, but still retains 3500MB/s sequential read. We were unable to determine if the drives use QLC or TLC as official information just lists it as "3D Flash Memory". An educated guess would be that these drives use QLC, given the consistent read speeds found across all of the drives. 

There are many other alternatives for high performance NVMe SSD drives but if you want a simple drive to rejuvenate an old desktop or laptop, then this may be an option. 

The drives start from $65 on Amazon for the 500GB model.

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Les Pounder
Les Pounder

Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • MrCommunistGen2
    Article title calls it CS2310. Article then doesn't actually name drive. Yet the pictures show that the model number is CS2130.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    I disagree with the assessment that it's only ideal for an aging setup or budget build.

    In the many reviews over the years TH has done, if you look at the real world performance figures that non-professional users will find relevant, such as Windows and application load times, game load times, and even writing several gigabytes of files at once, there is very little difference between a high end drive like the Samsung 970 Pro and a budget drive like the Intel 660p, because these users are primarily read only, and even if they're on gigabit fiber they're not going to exceed the write performance of even budget NVMe drives, except for obsolete drives like the 660p, but even then it's a question mark.

    Low end drives may not be AS fast sure, but when you're talking about a difference of 1-2 seconds, but a price difference of many tens of dollars, there's a strong argument to be made that the low to mid tier drives are what you should get, especially when that price difference allows you to get a 1TB or 2TB drive instead of a 500GB drive with money left over to improve your GPU or other hardware.
    Reply
  • deesider
    NVMe drives offer the perfect balance of size and performance. They attach directly to a slot on most modern desktop and laptop motherboards and leave no mess of cables for us to hide away in our builds.

    I strongly disagree with this.
    An NVMe drive is the perfect size for a laptop. Being restricted to such a tiny size on a desktop is absurd!

    - If only U2/U3 drives were mainstream!
    Reply
  • S_Castle
    MrCommunistGen2 said:
    Article title calls it CS2310. Article then doesn't actually name drive. Yet the pictures show that the model number is CS2130.
    Yes; apparently it is actually a CS2130. Also, the minimum price I found on Amazon was $127 for the 500GB model. The PNY site's specs for the CS2130 match what was reported here.

    I don't know where the reporter got the price info, but it seems to be wrong.
    Reply
  • Zashee
    Is this DRAM-less?
    Reply
  • deesider
    Zashee said:
    Is this DRAM-less?
    According to the PNY brochure it uses a dram cache: https://www.pny.com.tw/en/ecatalogue-detail/60Whether it is any good or not, best find some reviews 🆒
    Reply