PNY XLR8 CS3150 Overview
The PNY XLR8 CS3150 is really defined by its large active-cooling solution. On the top of the drive it says both “PNY” and “XLR8” and we have our two tiny cooling fans.
The drive is designed as a M.2 2280 drive so it is 80mm long. This means it shouldn’t have any problem being installed on your motherboard. As far as the height goes we measured the drive at 16.9mm tall. Height really shouldn’t be an issue as most Gen5 M.2 slots sit above your top PCI-Express slot on new motherboards. The cooling solution and heatsink are held together by screws on each side.
Flipping the drive over there is a sticker on the bottom giving us all of the relevant information on the drive.
Coming off of the bottom-edge of the drive is a USB 2.0 header cable that you’ll connect to an internal header on your motherboard. This will provide control for the fans as well as the RGB lighting that is on the top of the drive. This is all made possible because PNY has embedded a micro-controller in the heatsink.
As I mentioned earlier the drive is powered by Phison’s E26 controller, which most of the Gen5 drives we’ve tested have been based on. We also have Micron’s 232-layer 3D TLC NAND as well as a Sk Hynix cache chip.
