PNY CS1311 SSD Review (480GB) – An Easy HDD to SSD Upgrade!

You may recall that earlier this week we posted a review of the PNY CS2211 SSD, specifically designed for gamers and enthusiasts. Today we are looking at the simpler consumer drive the PNY CS1311 SSD, designed to make upgrading from the lagging HDD a breeze. As PNY explains, this drive is an excellent option for replacing a hard drive, a secondary drive for photo and video storage and as a boot drive. Let’s dig in!

SSD SPECIFICATIONS & PRICING

Knowing that this drive is the little brother to the CS2211, we expect to see speeds a tiny bit lower, but in turn, the expectation is that pricing will also drop with it. The CS1311 is available is four capacities, 120, 240, 480 and 960GB.

The 120GB capacity is listed to reach read speeds of up to 550 MB/s and write speeds up to 510  MB/s. Jumping up to 240, 480 and 960 GB capacity, you will only see the max sequential write speed increase up to 520 MB/s.

PNY lists the 120 GB MSRP to be $49.99, the 240 GB is at $79.99, the 480 GB is at $149.99 and the 960 GB is at $299.99. This puts the price per gigabyte at roughly $0.31/GB. If you head on over to Amazon, you will see the price is currently discounted across all capacities.

This 2.5″ form factor SATA-III 6 Gb/s is backwards compatible to SATA-II 3 Gb/s, and is listed to have a typical power consumption of 2.5W and idles at 0.2W, which is 0.2W less than the CS2211. This makes the CS1311 an excellent and easy option for laptops and notebooks.

The drive is also accompanied with three years of limited warranty and Acronis True Image Data Migration Software. We believe this is a great addition to the SSD kit as it makes migrating from that old and dusty HDD to SSD a breeze.

SSD COMPONENTS

The front of the packaging is relatively straightforward, as the CS1311 is displayed along with the some quick details. It also points out in the top right that it is a 6 GB/s, which we presume is a typo that should indicate SATA-III 6 Gb/s. As we said earlier, expect to see throughput much less than 6 GB/s.

The backside of the packaging goes into much more details as to the specifications of the drive, as well as including other languages. Inside the packaging, you will also receive a 2.5mm spacer for easier installation.

Where the front of the CS2211 gave us the impression that it was a sports car that was ready to tear up the track, the CS1311 has a more luxurious look to it.

The backside of the PNY CS1311 is straightforward as it displays the model number, part number and serial number.

On the front of the PCB, you will find the Phison controller, eight NAND modules and the DRAM.

On the backside of the PCB, you will see that there are eight empty slots for potentially greater storage capacities.

The PNY CS1311 features a total of eight TLC Toshiba NAND modules, putting each at a capacity of 64GB. As you will see, after formatting there is a total usable space of 447 GB, leaving about 9% used for over-provisioning and firmware.

Similar to the CS2211, the PNY CS1311 features a Phison PS3110-S10-X 32-bit quad-core eight channel SATA III 6Gb/s controller and a NANYA DDR3L DRAM package of 512MB memory operating at 800MHz.