When I think of the name PNY I generally think of graphics cards, but they do have quite a large range of storage products, including solid state drives. When it comes to Gen5, or PCI-Express 5.0 storage we’ve seen that it really takes active cooling to really keep these drives from thermally throttling. The problem is many of the drives we’ve seen so far have active cooling, but there is no way to control it. PNY hopes to change that with their XLR8 CS3150 drive. This drive makes use of Phison’s E26 controller and Micron’s 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. On top of that the drive is cooled off by an active cooling solution that you can control via an app and there is even RGB lighting! Is this the Gen5 drive you need to pick up? Read on as we take a look!
Special thanks to PNY for providing us with the XLR8 CS3150 Gen5 Solid State Drive to review.
Specifications
Packaging on the PNY XLR8 CS3150
The XLR8 CS3150 comes in a nice retail box that is not much larger than the drive itself. On the front we have a picture of the drive and it does let us know the speeds (11,500 MB/s read / 8,500 MB/s write), and that it has a 5-year warranty.
On the back we have a full list of specifications and features.
Opening the box up all we find is the drive itself.
