PNY CS2130 1TB NVMe SSD Review Cannot Recommend

We are moving towards using larger test sizes on our benchmarks, but on several tests, we also used the smaller default-test sizes. This allows us to see the difference between lighter and heavier workloads.

CrystalDiskMark is used as a basic starting point for benchmarks as it is something commonly run by end-users as a sanity check.

To start with, CrystalDiskMark looks pretty good for the PNY CS2130 1TB. Read performance is very close to the rated number, and write performance exceeds the 1800 MB/s specification by a little bit. In terms of relative performance on our graph, the CS2130 is looking pretty good, especially in the context of a read-heavy workload.

Moving to the larger CrystalDiskMark test has absolutely no effect on the PNY CS2130 1TB.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark has been a staple of drive sequential performance testing for years. ATTO was tested at both 256MB and 8GB file sizes.

Unfortunately for PNY, ATTO tells an entirely different story than CrystalDiskMark. While read performance remains relatively good by maintaining performance above 3000 MB/s, the write performance is simply disastrous. We take our graph datapoint at the 32 MB mark in ATTO, but write performance is horrible for all the larger chunk sizes and dipping below 100 MB/s performance at the 48 MB chunk size.

Given the performance of this drive in the benchmark, the WD Red SA550 1TB has been added to the graphs to represent SATA drives, and in terms of write performance clearly beats out the CS2130.

If you thought the last ATTO benchmark was bad, the larger 8GB test is just a train wreck. Write performance is highly variable, yet somehow consistently bad throughout the test. Read performance is still good, but that is small comfort given the severity of the write performance problem.

Anvil鈥檚 Storage Utilities is a comprehensive benchmark that gives us a very in-depth look at the performance of drives tested. This benchmark was run with both a 1GB and 8GB test size.

Phison controllers and Anvil have always gotten along swimmingly, and despite the ATTO results the PNY CS2130 1TB continues that trend. Read performance is pretty middling as far as PCIe 3.0 SSDs go, losing out the likes of the WD Blue SN550 1TB and the Crucial P5 1TB, but write performance is strong as per normal with any Phison equipped drive.

Despite the ability for Phison drives to do well in Anvil write performance, the PNY CS2130 1TB suffers a very significant drop when moving to the larger test set. The drive still comfortably stays out of SATA territory, but the CS2130 is now nearly at the bottom of our chart in terms of write performance, only beating out the Crucial P2 and the SATA drive.

AS SSD Benchmark is another good benchmark for testing SSDs. We run all three tests for our series. Like other utilities, it was run with both the default 1GB as well as a larger 10GB test set.

In AS SSD, the PNY CS2130 1TB holds the position in the middle of the pack, narrowly edging out drives like the Crucial P2 and the WD Blue while losing out to higher performance drives like the SK hynix Gold P31 1TB.

As with most of the rest of our tests, the larger AS SSD test hurts the PNY CS2130’s relative positioning on our graph. The drive no longer beats the WD Blue SN550, and only narrowly avoids the very bottom of our chart.

SPECworkstation, direct comparisons, thermals, and our conclusion are up next.