PNY XLR8 CS3030 Low-Cost NVMe SSD Review (Page 2)
1TB Class Performance Testing
Product Comparison
The 1TB PNY XLR8 SC3030 goes against the most popular 1TB NVMe SSDs available today. These include the original Phison E12 SSD, the MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro.
Sequential Read Performance
As we mentioned on the previous page, the newer Phison E12 drives show more differences than we saw in the early drives we tested. The one thing that has stayed consistent is the dislike with our sequential read synthetic testing.
Drives with the E12 controller show a strong dip at queue depth (QD) 2 and 4 with our script but not with other software. This is artificial and has more to do with the previous workload than it does with reading sequential data. We will look at sequential reads later in this review.
Sequential Write Performance
The 1TB PNY SC3030 quickly moves to the top of our sequential burst write test with over 3,000 MB/s at QD2. The drive sets a new record for flash-based storage in a consumer SSD.
Sustained Sequential Write Performance
We mentioned Phison and partners have played with the firmware since we first started testing E12 products. The 1TB PNY CS3030 shows a more consistent sustained sequential write profile but at the expense of a slightly smaller SLC buffer compared to the MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro.
Random Read Performance
At low queue depths, the CS3030 shows the same random read performance we've seen with other E12 SSDs, right around 12,000 IOPS at QD1. The difference with this drive is its peak performance at high queue depths where it scales well past the other models at QD32 and above.
Random Write Performance
The random write performance profile also shows the highest burst speed, and that comes at QD8. At lesser queue depths, the 1TB CS3030 shows a different profile with marginally lower performance that simply takes longer to scale up like what we see with the other drives.
70% Read Sequential Performance
The sequential read dip carries over to the mixed workload test with a drop at QD4. The rest of the performance profile is similar to the BPX Pro.
70% Read Random Performance
The random mixed workload test shows similar performance to the BPX Pro until QD16. At QD16 and above, the XLR8 CS3030 scales above the other drives with even more IO.
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