PNY is looking to shatter the notion that buying a cutting-edge solid state drive (SSD) that leverages the PCI Express 5.0 bus has to be an expensive proposition. Proving otherwise is the company’s new CS2150 series that starts at $99.99 for 1TB of storage, making it the least expensive 1TB PCIe 5.0 SSD on the market. Or at least that’s true of our own search on the world wide interweb.
We went out hunting for PCIe 5.0 models and comparatively speaking, there aren’t that many options. There are far more PCIe 4.0 and earlier models to choose from, which makes sense given that PCIe 5.0 is a newer standard with less platform support. However, there are several models in the wild, just none that are priced quite as aggressively as the CS2150.
In terms of sequential speeds, the 1TB model is rated to achieve up to 10,200MB/s (10.2GB/s) for sequential reads and 8,300MB/s (8.3GB/s) for sequential writes. The 2TB model is a little bit faster, with PNY claiming sequential read and write speeds of up to 10,300MB/s (10.3GB/s) and 8,600MB/s (8.6GB/s), respectively.
Not accounting for overhead or anything else, the theoretical maximum speed that a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD is capable of hitting is 7.88GB/s (via four lanes), while Gen 5.0 models can theoretically ramp up to 15.75GB/s. So yes, PNY is leaving a lot of performance on the table, but it’s offering up to 30% faster speeds than the theoretical maximum for last-gen models.