On the bright side, it does easily defeat the PCIe driven Comay Blade drive on our chart, and that drive retails for about four times the cost of our little Optima array.įirst, let's discuss the bad. If you are running heavy-duty workloads, the Optima is not the drive/array for you, even its TRIM/GC performance is lower than the steady state performance of all the other arrays on our chart.
The Optima is advertised as an entry-level SSD, and this shows you why. This is the big daddy of all of our testing, and this is where we find the Optima somewhat lacking. Trace based consistency testing is where true high performing SSDs are separated from the rest of the pack. TRIM performance (the orange and red bars) is what we consider the second most important consideration when ranking a drive/array's performance. The reason we consider steady state performance more important than TRIM is that when you are running a heavy-duty workload, TRIM will not be occurring while that workload is being executed. We consider steady state bandwidth (the blue bar) our test that carries the most weight in ranking a drive/array's performance. For a more in-depth look at the Optima's feature set, I will refer you to Chris Ramseyer's extensive review of PNY's Optima 240GB SSD.
#PRECONDITIONED FLASH DRIVE PNY PLUS#
PNY backs the Optima with an industry standard three-year warranty (one-year standard warranty, plus an additional two years if you register the product within 90 days of purchase).īecause this is a RAID review, we are going to focus on performance rather than features. PNY's Optima SATA III SSD comes in a 2.5" x 7mm z-height form factor, and ships with a spacer should you need to increase the drive's thickness to 9.5mm. My advice is to stick with the 240GB capacity. You don't want to get a 480GB model with a Sandforce 2281 controller because of its unreasonably low performance with random 4K QD1 writes (the most important performance metric). If you want a 480GB version, there is again a big problem if you are unfortunate enough to get the Sandforce controller. However, if you go for a 120GB version and get a Sandforce 2281 equipped drive, sequential write speed with incompressible data (almost all data) will be a lowly 175 MB/s. At the 240GB capacity point, both controllers deliver comparable performance. As far as we know, the Optima comes with either a four-channel Silicon Motion SM2246EN controller, or an eight-channel Sandforce 2281 controller. Sequential speed is not provided because of the unfortunate fact that you don't really know what you are going to get as far as the controller goes. Random read/write performance is listed at up to 60,000/85,000 IOPS. PNY's Optima SATA III SSD is available in three capacities, 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB. Our Optima's came outfitted with Silicon Motion SM2246EN four-channel controllers, and 20nm IMFT NAND in BGA packages, which we consider the best BOM (Bill Of Materials) option that the Optima is known to ship with. Now that we have our disclaimers out there, let's get down to business, and see what kind of performance we can get from a two-drive array composed of a pair of 240GB PNY Optima SSDs. Standard TLC NAND might be palatable at about 20 cents per GB when paired with either a SM2246EN or a SF2281, but other than that, it would be unacceptable.
We can only hope that they would not use TLC NAND because it has sub-par performance and low endurance, unless it's 3D NAND with an emulated SLC layer (think Samsung 850 EVO). We are not sure why they have listed SLC NAND, because you can rest assured no Optima will ever be outfitted with SLC NAND because it is highly cost prohibitive. We've only seen Optima's equipped with MLC NAND in BGA packages (the good stuff), so we are going to go out on a limb here and say that is probably what you will get when you purchase an Optima.
The various types of NAND listed are synchronous-mode MLC, SLC, or TLC. PNY notes on the Optima's spec sheet that the Optima may be equipped with various types of NAND.
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