| | |  | | Home » PNY 128 GB Optima SSD SATA II 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) P-SSD2S128GM-CT01RB | | | | | | | Description: | | The PNY Optima Solid State Drive is the latest offering in a suite of PNY products that factor in improving the experience in and around your personal computer. The Optima SSD is the latest in storage technology over traditional notebook hard drives, offering improved operations across your entire system in terms of superior performance, faster application loading, longer battery life and greater shock resistance. Unlike hard drives, PNY's Optima SSD has no moving parts and is comprised of MLC Flash which offers the right mix of performance and durability with 240MB/sec read and 130MB/s write speeds that easily outperform the fastest hard drives. Also featured on the drives, is 64MB of onboard cache – a DRAM buffer that ensures the SSD performs at its best by reducing the possibility of bottlenecks within data transfers. Optima’s SSDs are TRIM enabled, providing a safeguard from performance degradation – allowing the drive to stay closer to its peak performance over time. The SSD has a 2.5-inch form factor and features a SATA II interface which is backwards compatible with SATA allowing it to be an easy drop-in replacement for your notebook hard drive. The drives are compatible with Windows 7, Vista, and XP as well as Linux and Mac OS X and later. | | | Features: | |
• Read: 240 MB/s, Write: 130 MB/s
• Compatible with Windows 7, XP, Vista, Linux, Mac OS X and above
• 64 MB Onboard Cache, Seek Time: less than 0.1ms
• TRIM enabled - provides a safeguard from performance degradation, allowing the SSD to stay closer to peak performance over time
• mini-USB 2.0 port - storage portability
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 3.93 inches | | Product Width:
| 2.63 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.37 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.2 pounds | | Package Length:
| 6.0 inches | | Package Width:
| 4.2 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.8 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.2 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 7 reviews |
| | | | Used and New: | | | |
| All | |
| $144.32 This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. | Used
- VeryGood | | | $243.99 This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. | New | |
| New | |
| $243.99 This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. | New | |
| Used | |
| $144.32 This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. | Used
- VeryGood | |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 7 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 PNY 128GB SSD IS faster than I was expectingJul 31, 2010
By J
I decided to get the PNY SSD for my desktop tower and was pleasantly surprised with it's performance. At $225 the PNY was cheaper than other 128GB drives. Back around the 7th of July, 2010 there weren't any reviews or people even talking about it which made it hard to know what to expect. However, because the specs looked really good, I figured why not give it a try. The first thing I did when I got my drive was to copy my Windows 7 HD partition to it using acronis. There are of course many other ways to do this, or a clean install is also good. Right off the bat I noticed that Windows 7 seemed to load in less than 1/2 the time! Originally my i7 based pc would boot from a western digital HD in about 22 seconds. But now it was like 10 to 11!! The very next thing I did was to run Crystal Disk Mark 2.2 and got a sequential read speed of 244 MB/sec! and write speed of 156 MB/sec which is way better than my HD. The 512K result got 186 for read and 147 for write. The 4K was 20.04 read and 23.46 write. It gets everything PNY was advertising. Also when I got the drive, the box has upgraded numbers that put the write speed at 150 and not 130 like Amazon describes. Sometimes it got up to 248MB/sec read and 167MB/sec write as numbers can change on subsequent tests. But all benches were in that rough range of figures. It's write speed is also quite a bit faster than Intel X-25 series drive as they only seem to get about 80 MB/sec on sequential writes.
Next I loaded some favorite applications and they came up much faster. Games, browsers, video editors, studio applications etc all loaded notably faster. What I'm finding out is that the PNY is actually one of the faster SSD's on the market in it's price range, or perhaps even $75-$100 more. Of course there are faster drives out there, but I've found that many that are around double the price aren't usually that much faster. Of course there are a few ultra high end drives that are even better, but I didn't set out to buy the most expensive drive. Given that the write performance is faster than a lot of comparably priced drives out there, and maybe almost twice as fast as the Intel X25M I kind of disagree with another review here that says this is the "5400 rpm drive" of SSD's. It kind of gives the impression the PNY is like the slow, economy, version of SSD's which isn't true. I agree it's not top end, but this PNY is no slouch. In fact it may just be the best bang for the buck, in the SSD market right now.
Because I "image" my HD backups I was also able to test XP. From the point it first says loading windows, I got to he desktop in 9 seconds most times, but a couple of times it was like 10 which is roughly what win 7 got. That of course could vary with the installation and depends on what kind of hardware a person has. But I'd think any one could get a boost over HD performance with this, give or take.. I also didn't have to fool around with AHCI or any other settings. I just connected it and it acted like like a regular HD. Of course that could be different on other BIOS's and motherboards, but it did work out easily for me. Plus the drive also includes TRIM. Another nice touch is they managed to fit a mini USB connector on the back of this very thin drive. Normally I'd use the SSD for a system drive, but I hooked up a USB cable and found it acts just like a giant USB flash drive. I could then walk up to any pc with USB ports and copy files with no problems. The strange thing is that PNY doesn't seem to do a very good job of advertising their drive at all. You would never know it's a good drive by visiting their site for example which is unfortunate. And few people are talking about it. That said, I give this 5 stars for being a good price per GB and faster than I expected.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Reliabilty is POOR :(Jun 01, 2011
By Hazel McPherson
For the money, I thought that this drive would give me a fantastic improvement on my regular hdd - and it did! However, after having the drive installed for only 1 month, trouble has started and reliability of drive has made me seriously think hard about ssd's.
Like others, I too am having problems with this drive in that during the last month it's been installed, twice it has randomly refused to be recognised in the BIOS. Everything installed OK, no issues at all for about a month then BSOD and on reboot drive didn't exist! I unplugged all cables to the drive and reseated and on reboot it went straight in. However, today on boot up it refuses to do anything and just sits at the HP POST screen (not had chance to investigate myself yet but suspect its the same issue as before!). How can the drive just 'get lost' ? ? Otherwise a nice speedy drive but reliability is poor :(
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Fast but UnreliableFeb 18, 2011
By Rodney Duckworth
I'll preface this by saying I am a Level 2/3 systems admin by day, so I do know my way around Windows and PC hardware, broken and not.
I've had this drive since mid-August 2010 and, right off the bat, I'll say this drive is incredibly fast. I have been using 7200rpm hard drives since they existed. Always OK, but I read some good things about SSD technology and thought it was time I get on the wagon. As a boot partition, this disk replaced a 7200rpm 160GB WD drive. My boot time from the time Windows 7 Pro started loading (i.e. not counting BIOS/POST) to the login screen went from 29 seconds to 15 seconds. Blew me away. I reinstalled my games, copied all my profile data back (music/photos/documents,etc.) and got back to the way I was before the HD replacement. All was grand for a while.
In late September (~1.5 months after installing), I was opening the Pictures folder and found it wouldn't open. Got an error to tune of "Could not locate data." I freaked for a second, but I have a backup, so I rebooted. On restart, chkdsk kicks off automatically (I didn't schedule it) before I get to the login screen. It scans my disk, finds an enormous list of errors in the Pictures folder, repairs them and all was well again.
Then November 1. I was away for almost a week with everything shut down. Power my computer on and no Windows. BIOS sees the disk, but nothing loads. After POST, my screen goes black except for a random spattering of red, blue and green dots, about 2x2pixels each, spread all across my screen. It stayed there for hours. When I was satisfied it wasn't going to do anything else, I hit the reset button and got the same thing, only this time it only lasted a second or two before Windows 7's built-in startup troubleshooter kicked in and started scanning for problems. I tried every option available in this pre-boot area (there are many) and nothing brought my computer back. In the end, my final option was to restore from a system image backup. I did this and everything was back to normal. As far as I can tell, nothing disappeared.
Then Christmas. Exact same thing. I had been away for about a week and came back to find a non-working computer. Same spattering of dots. Same failed repair. Had to restore system image.
Then early February. Exact same thing again. Intense frustration led me to dig into the logs of the startup troubleshooter. I discovered the problem it was finding was that HAL.DLL was corrupt and couldn't be repaired. Using the built-in tools, I was able to replace HAL.DLL with a good copy. Restart and I made it to the login screen, pretty much. I heard the startup sound and saw the Shut Down and Ease of Access buttons at the botton of the screen, but no user names, no password box, just a black screen with the two buttons at the bottom - which worked BTW - and a new error box saying that HID.DLL was from an unrecognized version of Windows. I booted back into startup repair and replaced that file the same as I had HAL.DLL. On restart, I didn't get the error anymore, but I still had the black login screen. After more repairs and chkdsks, I threw in the towel and restored from system image again.
After the latest incident I did some thinking and believe I have found a possible commonality in all three cases. I regularly put my computer in Sleep or Hibernate mode. Only when I have problems, will be away for a while, or install Windows updates that require a reboot will I actually shut down. All three times, this problem occurred after an extended period (30+ days) of not shutting down. I don't know what that means, but there's no way it's a coincidence.
To wrap this up, the drive was and is very fast if you're moving from a standard hard drive to SSD; there's no doubt about that. However, the constant data corruption means this thing is useless in the long run. I would not recommend anyone purchase without a solid backup plan in place and lots of patience for system restore.
At present, I haven't yet contacted PNY for warranty service. I'm sure they'll cover it albeit with a refurbished drive, no doubt. There are also no firmware updates available, so that wasn't an option.
3 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Great Price/GBJul 24, 2010
By Sicily1918
"Sicily1918"
This is a great little SSD which PNY has seemingly opted to keep quiet about -- there're very few reviews on the web (at least as of this date) for this drive. This is my second SSD and so far I'm not disappointed. This particular drive replaced my MacBook Pro's fine 250GB, 5400rpm Seagate drive (which was moved to a USB enclosure for storage) and pretty much blew it out of the water.
Pros:
* Price/GB is great ($240/128GB = $1.875/GB)
* Performance vs. traditional HDs
* TRIM support
* Great replacement for a laptop
* Bargain desktop OS drive (e.g., install your OS and frequently accessed programs in here and get a big, fat 2TB drive for everything else)
* Fantastic speed difference vs. 5400rpm drives.
* Great speed difference vs. 7200rpm drives with less heat/power usage than 5400rpm drives.
* 3-year PNY warranty
* Drive is made in Taiwan
Cons:
* This is not the fastest SSD on the market, but then, it's so freaking fast it doesn't really matter unless you need some incredible IOPS.
* Price/GB is still rather high in comparison to standard HDDs.
* Low capacity (128GB when many laptops are equipped with at least 320GB drives).
Overall:
If you're looking to spruce up your laptop and are looking for a bargain, this drive would be it. From a *performance* standpoint, it's the equivalent of dropping a WD VelociRaptor in your laptop, without the heat and battery drainage. As long as your expectations are realistic (this will not boot Windows/OS-X in 2 seconds or load your apps before you click on them), you should be very happy with this SSD.
As for storage capacity, get a $15 USB enclosure and turn your old laptop HDD into a storage bin and you get the best of both worlds.
3/12/11 Update
This drive is still going strong -- I use my MacBook Pro almost every day and have OS-X and Win7 (Bootcamp) on it; no appreciable slowdown (yay for TRIM support on NTFS/Win7), no issues whatsoever. I've dumped large files (including large VirtualBox VM's) all over the drive, deleted them, modified, whatever, and the drive's going as strong as when I got it (~8 months now).
2/29/12 Update
The drive is still fine. I moved it to a Dell laptop which ran Linux (ext4) for a few months and is now on Windows 7/NTFS. Would I buy again? Yes.
Performance and Reliability. What's not to love?Mar 23, 2011
By bakrob99
What's not to love? Absolutely nothing. It's all good with this drive. Windows boots up and my apps run faster than ever before. Anytime the disk is accessed it is immediate. I have had this drive for 3 weeks without incident. I had it installed after my conventional hard disk drive failed to boot without ANY prior warning of potential problems. And of course, my last backup was about 5 weeks out of date and I lost some work. So I wanted a solution that promised incredible reliability and performance which I have now found. I added a 1 TB drive for additional storage of anything which isn't accessed frequently. So I don't mind the restriction of 128GB. Actually the 64GB unit would have done but this unit had better performance specs. Only thing missing is a bracket to install it in a desktop which I had to purchase separately.
See all 7 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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