PNY XLR8 CS2211 240GB SSD in 2-Disk RAID Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, the new PNY XLR8 CS2211 can be tricky to find in Europe. In fact, I couldn’t find a single shop having it available yet. In the US, it’s already widely available and definitely a drive to check out, for example from NewEgg for just $84.99 or $69.99 through PNY’s own website.

Conclusion

The PNY XLR8 doesn’t come with any specific RAID running in its firmware nor ratings for it, but the drive still did very well in our tests today. We saw a great scaling throughout the entire benchmarks.

With a performance up to around 1GB/s reading and 850MB/s writing, depending on setup, we got a setup that can rival the newer generation form factors without having to have the available connectors on the motherboard. The random performance was great too and we saw both read and write scores up to 133K. Access time also got cut down, close to half of what the single drive performs. Overall, a great result.

Considering the price of this drive, and also the bigger capacity options at your disposal, the PNY XLR8 CS2211 is an awesome drive that kicks even more in RAID than it does in single drive mode.

Pros

• Great scalability
• Past 1GB/s transfer speeds with 2 drives
• Over 130K IOPS random performance
• Backwards compatible thanks to SATA3 interface
• Cheap and easy setup.

Cons

• none

“Considering the price and performance, the PNY XLR8 CS2211 is an awesome drive that kicks even more in RAID than Single drive mode.”

Thanks to PNY for providing us with these test samples