PNY Prevail Elite 240GB SSD Review

Introduction

PNY has flown under the radar here at TweakTown for quite some time. The company tends to focus on their high-margin big box store products, NVIDIA Quadro parts that they have a monopoly on, at least on this side of the globe or with their relationships with large OEMs. From time to time, the company supports the DIY / overclocking / enthusiast market, but they don't intentionally toss their products in the ring very often.

When it comes to products, PNY is all over the place. On one side, they have a run of professional products like the Quadro deal with NVIDIA, flash memory cards (PNY is actually a supporter of the White House News Photographers Association), a full line of DRAM products and their newest venture producing high quality solid state drives. At the same time, the company has consumer accessory-like products, like low-cost headphones and HDMI cables.

Going forward, PNY has high aspirations in the SSD space. With a large new factory built in New Jersey, PNY has one of the very few SSD manufacturing facilities in North America. PNY hasn't released their monthly production numbers, but with their own product line and parts made under the HP brand, PNY is churning out a large volume of SSDs.

Sitting at the top of the PNY SSD product line is the Prevail Elite. The Prevail Elite is a very special SSD that shares many of the same specs with the consumer focused Prevail. The difference between the Elite and the consumer Prevail is the Elite's 10K P/E cycle NAND flash, up from the 3K NAND found on a majority of consumer SSDs. PNY says the Prevail Elite is best used for cloud storage, networking, RAID configurations and servers.

In the past, we've seen other companies make a big deal about their 5K P/E cycle products. Intel's 520 Series and Kingston's original Hyper X come to mind. The PNY Prevail Elite trumps these products with double the program erase cycles. That makes it fit for high write environments, like a temporary destination for downloaded content on your NAS server. This is an area where I burn through consumer SSD's due to the PAR and RAR stages. These are also the same stages to benefit the most from flash-based storage due to the high IOPS performance.

That's just one example of use, but you may think the PNY Prevail is an expensive option for the task. If you look at PNY's website and see the $749.99 price, then you'd be correct. For those looking for one of the best values in the SSD space, then the Google shopping price of $229 is a better option. The Google option brings this hybrid consumer / enterprise product within reach of enthusiasts.