PNY XLR8 120 GiB SSD Review

Introduction

There are many components in a PC that can be upgraded to make it faster, but none are as noticeable in the real world as upgrading a hard drive to a solid state drive. They have come down significantly in price over the last few years, so it’s now cheaper than ever to upgrade your PC. Units in the 120 GiB range still offer low price, excellent cost/benefit ratio, and have enough space to be used as boot drive. Today, we will test the PNY XLR8 120 GiB unit.

The PNY XLR8 can be found in 120 GiB, 240 GiB, and 480 GiB capacities. The model we are analysing today has 128 GiB of memory inside, but is sold as 120 GiB, since 8 GiB is reserved for overprovisioning, used by the garbage collection and wear leveling mechanisms of the unit.

In our tests, we will compare the performance of the PNY XLR8 120 GiB against the Kingston SSDNow V300, with the same capacity, which is one of the best-sellers in the martket.

Figure 1: the two SSDs compared

Before proceeding, we highly suggest that you read our “Anatomy of SSD Units” tutorial, which provides all the background information you need to know about SSDs. Both of the SSDs featured in this review use MLC memory chips.

In the table below we compare the PNY XLR8 120 GiB with the Kingston SSDNow V300 120 GiB. Both units use a SATA-600 interface and are based on the 2.5” form factor.

We researched the prices on the day that we published this review. In the table below, we provide a more in-depth technical comparison between the two drives.