PNY CS2150 SSD review: This is the PCIe 5.0 value buy to beat

At a glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Fast PCIe 5.0 HMB performer
• Affordable for the speed
• Maintains a decent write rate after secondary cache is exhausted

Cons

• Not as fast as PCIe 5.0 DRAM designs

Our Verdict

The PNY CS2140 is affordable for PCIe 5.0, and excelled (for a host memory buffer design) in both synthetic benchmark and real-world testing.

Price When Reviewed

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The PNY CS2150 is the second host memory buffer PCIe 5.0 SSD we’ve tested and it’s a very good performer. It can’t quite match the best DRAM designs, but it’s also a heck of a lot cheaper and very fast in the grand scheme of SSDs — 9th fastest among all.

Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best SSDs for comparison.

What are the PNY CS2120’s features?

The CS2150 is a PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe SSD in the 2280 (22mm wide, 80mm long) form factor, built around a Phison PS5031-E31T controller. As noted, it’s a host memory buffer design (your device’s memory serves as primary cache) utilizing 218-layer, Kioxia BiCS8 TLC NAND.

Secondary caching is implemented by writing portions of the TLC as SLC. The reduced error checking required for two-state cells makes this much faster than checking the eight possible voltage states of TLC written natively.

The CS2150 carries a five-year warranty that’s mitigated by a 600TBW (terabytes that may be written) per 1TB of capacity rating — i.e., the warranty expires after you’ve written that much data, like car warranties expire after you’ve driven the allotted number of miles.

How much does the PNY CS2150 cost?

The CS2150 is $104 for the 1TB model and $188 for the 2TB capacity on the company’s website at the time of this writing. That’s not strictly bargain basement, but not bad at all for a PCIe 5.0 SSD with its type of performance.

How fast is the PNY CS2150?

The 2TB CS2150 I tested is very fast in the grand scheme (9th place), nearly dead even with the other PCIe 5.0 HMB SSD I previously tested — the Corsair MP700 Elite. However, it’s not particularly fast for a PCIe 5.0 SSD if you include DRAM designs such as the big daddy Crucial T705 shown in the charts below.

The WD Black SN7100 is a PCIe 4.0 HMB design included to show the real-world transfer differences between PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0. Due to Windows limitations, the difference is not nearly as large as it is in the synthetic benchmarks.

The CS2150 barely lost to the MP700 Elite in CrystalDiskMark 8’s sequential transfer tests. But lose it did — by less than a percentage point.

The CrystalDiskMark 8 random tests were a mixed bag for the CD2150, winning one and losing on three tests to the MP700 Elite by a small but noticeable margin.

In truth, the CS2150 and MP700 Elite are basically the same drive — same controller, same NAND — which is reflected in their tie in the 48GB transfers. The margin of error in these tests is a couple of seconds.

Even though the CS2150 lost to the Corsair MP700 Elite in the 450GB write, it was a relatively close contest. This write can be affected by the current state of the SSD. We format and TRIM the SSDs before each test, but not every SSD recovers in the same amount of time.

The CS2150 even survived our post-main testing 900GB write test. While the drive slowed from 3GBps to around 2GBps in short order, it didn’t dip further until about 90 percent of the data had been written. Even then it was only to a tolerable 600MBps. Nice.

In total, the CS2150 is a very fast SSD that on another day might have outperformed the Corsair MP700 Elite. It’s a toss-up really.

Should you buy the PNY CS2150?

If you’re looking for top performance, without a top-shelf expenditure then the PNY CS2150 should be on your short list. It can’t match a good PCIe 5.0 DRAM design, but it’s still darn fast and again — a lot more affordable. Indeed, while it’s in a near dead-heat with its HMB peer Corsair MP700 Elite, the CS2150 is about $30 less than that SSD in both 1TB and 2TB options, making it the clear value choice for PCIe 5.0.

How we test

IDG’s storage tests currently utilize Windows 11 (22H2) 64-bit running on an X790 (PCIe 5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 modules (64GB of memory total). Intel integrated graphics are used. The 48GB transfer tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk taking up 58GB of the 64GB total memory. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, which also contains the operating system.

Each test is performed on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that as any drive fills up, performance will decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, and other factors.

The performance numbers shown apply only to the drive we were shipped as well as the capacity tested. SSD performance can vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips to read/write across and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching (writing TLC/QLC as SLC). Vendors also occasionally swap components. If you ever notice a large discrepancy between the performance you experience and that which we report (systems being roughly equal), by all means—let us know.