Installation, Software, Drive Information & Testing Procedures
When I first installed the drive I did notice that the cable coming off it essentially goes right over my top PCI-Express slot. You are going to have to bend this out of the way and route it to the bottom of your motherboard to connect it to a USB 2.0 header.
When it comes to the software you’ll need to download PNY’s VelocityX software. It is pretty interesting that this software is not listed on the product page at all for the drive. You can download it here though. You should see the drive show up in the software and when you click on it you’ll be able to see information on the drive, see its temperature and fan speed in real time, and set the fan speed. The fan speed can be set via a fan curve, so you can select auto, full speed, or custom. When you click over to the Lighting tab you can select the lighting mode, the speed of the effect, and brightness.
PNY sent us over the 1TB version of the drive, so with the drive installed and formatted we have 931GB of usable space.
Opening up CrystalDiskInfo we can see that the drive is using NVMe Express 2.0 and supports TRIM.
For testing the drive we will be using the following benchmarking programs, we have provided links to each so you can run the benchmarks on your drive for comparison.
ATTO Disk Benchmark (download)
CrystalDiskMark 64bit (download)
AS SSD Benchmark (download)
Anvil Storage Utility Professional (download)
PCMark 10 (download)
3DMark Storage Benchmark (download)
AIDA64 Storage Benchmark (download)
We also made these optimization changes…
– No power saving options in the BIOS
– ACHI enabled in the BIOS
So let’s get into testing!
