We recently published a review of the CS2211 SSD from PNY's premium XLR8 line. The CS2211 is aimed at gamers and enthusiasts, and uses Toshiba 15nm MLC flash. The CS1311 we're testing today employs Toshiba's 15nm TLC NAND for more value-oriented shoppers. PNY's PS3110-S10-powered drive uses Phison's new direct-to-die sequential write algorithm to increase performance, so we're anxious to see what it can do.
TLC-based SSDs from every company other than Samsung are slow compared to drives armed with MLC and SLC flash. In fact, they set SSD performance back several generations in some very common workloads. Not every application suffers, but you'll notice big software installations slow to a crawl, for instance. Depending on the flash used, you'll see sequential write speeds drop as low as 70 MB/s after a couple of seconds—that's less than a modern disk-based hard drive!
Phison is the first controller vendor aside from Samsung to address the issue. By using an approach called direct-to-die, sequential data fills the SLC buffer first, and then begins to write directly to the flash. Without the direct-to-die algorithm, information would pass to the small SLC buffer area and then "fold" into the NAND. The buffer needs to purge its data to the flash before accepting more. Usually this happens quickly, so you don't notice a pause during the transfer. But it does affect performance. By skipping over the buffer and writing straight to the NAND, sequential write performance more than doubles on high-capacity SSDs. Lower-capacity drives don't benefit as much, but they're still a lot faster in those operations.
The CS1311 uses Phison's new direct-to-die algorithm, but that's not its only compelling feature. When manufacturers realized that TLC-based SSDs were not popular with mainstream users, their prices dropped quickly. When you consider that value proposition and improved performance together, drives like the CS1311 start looking like solid additions to mid-range PCs.
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