Introduction

PNY Technologies was founded in 1985, in New Jersey, USA. The company manufactures a variety of computer peripherals, including graphics cards, flash memory cards, USB drives and solid-state drives. The company is also a major manufacturer of NVIDIA graphics cards.

I’ve reviewed several PCI-Express 5.0 SSDs this year and one of my biggest criticisms was that these drives require serious cooling, which means vendors are bundling actively cooled thermal solutions with their drives. The problem is that all these models rely on a “dumb” cooler that’s running at a fixed fan speed, with no RPM control or fan-stop capability when the drive is idle. PNY is finally addressing this with their CS3150 XLR8 PCIe Gen 5 solid-state-drive. Instead of a SATA or fan connector, their drive is using an internal USB header for connection with the host system. This not only ensures power delivery, it also provides a communication channel between PC and heatsink, so you can monitor and control the fans’ operation via software. PNY is also including adjustable RGB on their drive, which is controlled by the same software.

Under the hood, you get the usual PCIe 5.0 set of components: Phison’s E26 controller, paired with Micron’s newest B58R 3D TLC NAND with 232-layers, rated for transfer rates up to 12 GB/s. As expected for a high-end drive, a DRAM cache chip is included, too.

Right now, the PNY CS3150 XLR8 is available as a 2 TB model only, for a price of $300+. A 1 TB variant will follow in a few weeks and PNY also has plans for a higher-capacity model, depending on demand, which will be announced at a later date. Besides the CS3150 XLR8 with ARGB, there’s also a model without RGB lighting, which connects using a 4-pin fan connector (not USB). You also get to choose between a black and white color theme for all these drives. PNY includes a five-year warranty with the CS3150 XLR8 SSD.