PNY CS2342 2TB SSD Review: High-Capacity TLC Performance In M.2 2230

Comparison Products

We have a small array of drives going up against the PNY CS2342 today. You can get a good feel of what drive is right for you, even with a small list. We first have the Crucial P310 (2230), which is surprisingly fast for a QLC flash drive, but its availability may become limited once the current supply runs out, as Micron is pivoting away from consumer memory products. The Corsair MP600 Mini is basically the same as the PNY CS2342, but pricing and availability vary.

Turning to older drives, the WD Black SN770M was a performance champ and can still win out in some tests. It’s very popular, but pulls more power. The other TLC drives in this range are like the Sabrent Rocket 2230, which basically uses a slower Phison controller but with comparable flash. This doesn’t matter as much for the PCIe 3.0 Steam Dec,k which is speed-limited. You can also go to QLC flash to save money on the higher capacity options with either the Silicon Power UD90 (2230), with the Rocket’s Phison controller, or the Kingston NV3 (2230) with an SMI controller that technically competes with the P310’s.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.

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We like what we see here. The CS2342 performs very well, only falling behind the QLC-based P310. While the P310’s hardware and optimization enable it to edge out the competition here, under poor conditions – if the drive is fuller after a large update – the CS2342 with TLC flash would probably be more consistent. This is because performance will drop more for a QLC drive as the flash is slower when doing operations outside the cache, which includes necessary internal maintenance tasks. We think any of these drives down to the Black SN770M would give the best experience.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

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The drive is a bit slower in PCMark 10. It’s in good company, though, getting close to the MP600 Mini (E27T) and Black SN770M, which are performance drives. We wouldn’t expect the NV3 to be faster in edge cases because it uses QLC flash, as defined above. The P310 does run away with the lead in this one, though, and since application performance will often be read-heavy – you may want responsiveness in a wide range of apps simultaneously, too – it probably provides the best experience even in less ideal circumstances.

Steam Deck Testing — Gaming, KDiskMark, and Temperature

The Steam Deck is not the only portable gaming system in town, but it was the first and most popular to take M.2 2230 SSDs. While some systems have moved on to fit 2280-length drives, 2230 and 2242 remain popular for many systems, and such drives will work fine in longer slots with the proper standoff or extender. The Deck operates in PCIe 3.0 mode for its SSD, which limits maximum bandwidth but has less of an impact on responsiveness. The Deck is also still useful for gauging drive temperature and power efficiency. Drives scale up/down with link speed to a predictable degree, and our Windows tests also provide insight into PCIe 4.0+ performance.

Our current testing for the Deck involves analyzing game load times for some popular games. This is probably the most important metric for gamers, but the difference between one SSD and another can be small. We also use KDiskMark, a CrystalDiskMark-like substitute that uses the flexible I/O (FIO) tester instead of Microsoft’s diskspd for its benchmarks. We also check the drive’s maximum temperature during this test to make sure that no throttling occurs.

The tests in this section are run under the stock Arch-based SteamOS Linux platform, but our other tests are conducted as per our normal reviews using Windows. Many portable gaming systems today use or can use Windows solo or in a multi-boot solution. This testing section is designed to give an idea of performance under Linux with the Proton compatibility layer.

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Does a second or two matter with loading games? Not really, although it can add up, and it’s easy to become impatient with multiplayer games in particular. It’s still worth knowing how fast games load on a drive because this scales to some degree. When the drive is very full and stressed with big updates, you want to know you can still load without lag. We think the CS2342 is great here if you want the best Deck or mobile experience.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type of workload that fits into the cache of most drives. It also has the highest IOPS for QD1 random reads, which is the number one metric people look at for real-world feel. We’re only disappointed by the QD1 sequential read performance, which is, thankfully, still good enough. The drive manages this while staying very cool, which reduces the likelihood of throttling, which is very important in the Deck and other host devices.

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You won’t be copying at speed a lot in a Steam Deck, but other devices can benefit from faster transfer performance. The CS2342 lands in a good spot. It has ample performance for tasks on handheld devices and has a significant lead over old favorites like the Black SN770M.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

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What we see are nice, clean ATTO curves from the CS2342. CDM sequential performance is also good, although the SN770M is a standout with QD1 reads. This metric is a good indicator of game and app loading performance, as many do have sequential workloads. Random 4K QD1 reads usually have more focus, and here the CS3242 finishes first by a whisker. This is excellent performanc,e and the drive will feel incredibly responsive. Random write latency is also fantastic, so this is a drive that can do more than just game.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, which is the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

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The PNY CS2342’s first mode is a very fast but temporary pSLC write mode where it writes at 6.06 GB/s for over eight seconds. The cache is therefore around 52GB, which matches our expectation for this hardware, which usually has one around 50GB. This is a very small cache with resultant trade-offs. It can’t cache as many writes, but its performance is much more consistent. Personally, we feel this usually provides the best experience as smaller, random, or bursty writes can still fit in the cache, which gets smaller as the drive fills, but remains adequate in size and performance due to not needing a lot of resizing, and your extreme edge case scenarios don’t feel as bad.

We’ve suspected in the past that Phison, the controller manufacturer, did this intentionally after getting negative feedback on some drives in the past. This is interesting for a drive in this form factor, as often you see fewer writes, but it’s great for enclosures where you’ll be seeing more writes. M.2 2230 drives often see a lot of movement as upgrade drives or in small enclosures, though, so it works. The change also accommodates our criticisms while fitting into our 50GB tests. We’re glad Phison took the feedback seriously and looked at real-world scenarios when going back to the drawing board.

Post-cache performance in the TLC mode is at around 800 MB/s. This is a good result and would be great for a 10Gbps enclosure if that’s your plan. In fact, this would be extremely effective for that type of usage, especially if you want a small form factor enclosure.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade, as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording, we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature.

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The CS2342 is efficient but on the lower end compared to newer drives. If power efficiency matters to you, this might put it lower on the list. It is still efficient enough for its intended usage, and we don’t see any problems there. The Black SN770M is more than 20% less efficient, which is substantial, but even that didn’t have heat issues in our testing, or really hurt battery life in a significant way. We do think the Black SN770M will run hotter in many cases, so the CS2342 is a good option if you want good performance but less throttle potential. Both drives top out at under 5W, which should be manageable in most cases.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

PNY CS2342 Bottom Line

The PNY CS2342 excels in all of the important areas for a drive in the M.2 2230 form factor. 2TB of space, strong real-world performance, reasonably good power efficiency, and it’s single-sided, too. This is great, although if you can use a 2242 drive, then 4TB is a reachable goal with the Corsair MP700 Micro. Samsung also has an OEM drive out for 4TB in that form factor, a shorter model of the PM9E1, but that is double-sided. Its advantage lies in the presence of DRAM and maximum PCIe 5.0 performance, and your other option is probably some variant of SK hynix’s BC711. Systems limited to 2230, like the Steam Deck, have to be more picky, but the CS2342 is perfect for it.

We’ve listed the drive’s power efficiency as a negative because it’s simply average by this point in time. This is not a big drawback in most cases, as it achieves a good power-performance balance. The impact on battery life won’t be large, and it’s efficient enough to avoid throttling, but some systems or projects may be more needy than others. There are times when you might want a different drive for performance in specific areas – the Crucial P310 (223) is surprisingly fast for a QLC-based SSD – or want that extra power efficiency, but overall, the PNY CS2342 will provide a good all-around experience. At the time of review, you can find the 2TB model for a reasonable price, and we strongly recommend it.

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