Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Does this PNY CS1111 SSD use a SandForce controller?

I recently finally upgraded to an SSD. I'm not too impressed. Some things are much faster, but those are generally rare operations such as rebooting and installing software or updates. Operating system caching and preloading was taking care of common operations. Practically speaking, going from a 160 GB Seagate 7200.7 to a 1 TB WD Black and later upgrading from 2 GB to 6 GB RAM were both more useful.

I chose a PNY CS1111 series 120 GB drive. It doesn't have the fastest read speeds, but it's faster than 3 Gbit/s SATA or 1x PCI Express 1.x, so the GA-P35-DS3R motherboard is the bottleneck.

According to PNY's 2015 SSD Product Comparison PDF, the CS1111 series uses a Silicon Motion SM2246EN controller. However, the SMART attributes don't make sense as SM2246EN attributes, and make sense as SandForce attributes. For example 241 and 242 are definitely measuring gigabytes. So, is PNY's information wrong? Are there multiple versions of this drive with different controllers? PNY's support didn't answer. I don't feel like opening up the drive to see if there's a SandForce controller inside, because that would void warranty. Here are the SMART attributes, as reported by smartmontools.

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_
FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       82
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       85
171 Unknown_Attribute       0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
172 Unknown_Attribute       0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
174 Unknown_Attribute       0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       2
177 Wear_Leveling_Count     0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
181 Program_Fail_Cnt_Total  0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
182 Erase_Fail_Count_Total  0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0000   033   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       33
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       1262
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0000   098   098   003    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
201 Unknown_SSD_Attribute   0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
204 Soft_ECC_Correction     0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
230 Unknown_SSD_Attribute   0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       39
231 Temperature_Celsius     0x0000   100   100   010    Old_age   Offline      -
       33
233 Media_Wearout_Indicator 0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
234 Unknown_Attribute       0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       1
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       125
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       52

2 comments:

Barry K. Nathan said...

The PDF you linked has been updated (Apple Preview shows that it was created on October 5, 2015), and it now shows the CS1111 as a Silicon Motion SM2246EN drive. The only PNY drives listed as SandForce are the 120-480GB CL4111 and the EP7011.

Your drive's SMART attributes also look very similar to those on my 480GB CS2111, which is also listed in the PDF as an SM2246EN drive. (I haven't used the drive much so I don't really have an opinion on it. Well, except that MacBook screws don't seem to fit properly into either my CS2111 or my 240GB PNY Optima, a problem which I never experienced with any other 2.5" SSDs, so I'll keep the drives for use in my PCs but I'm not likely to buy any more 2.5" PNY SSDs.)

Boris Gjenero said...

In September I tried to use this drive in a different computer which had a miswired SATA power connector, with ground connected to 12V. This damaged the drive, so I ended up opening it up and saw that it indeed has a SM2246EN controller. I'm not sure why the SMART values are a closer match for SandForce. That's probably due to the firmware.

I ended up fixing the drive and am still using it in my laptop. Mounting it there was a bit of a problem. It was interfering with the cover on the hard drive slot, and even after modifying that, it still doesn't fit perfectly but it's good enough. The WD Blue drive that was there before fit perfectly. It's as if PNY has been careless with case dimensions and precision.