Review: PNY Prevail Elite (240GB)

Final Thoughts And Rating

The £180 PNY Prevail Elite 240GB SSD is a difficult drive to evaluate properly. It is architected to handle massive amounts of data traffic without issue, with the firm claiming a program-erase longevity of 10,000 cycles, or over 3x the standard for premium consumer SSDs. Truth is, we have no readily-available means of testing lofty P/E claims that are the cornerstone of this drive, so evaluating it using our standard benchmarking suite isn't the perfect answer.

Yet while the Prevail Elite uses some of the finest flash memory currently available, courtesy of Intel, SandForce's long-in-the-tooth SF-2281 controller dictates that overall performance isn't as hot as recently-released drives from Samsung and OCZ, for example.

Peeling back the onion and referencing the reviewed 240GB drive, you're really paying a £40 premium for an additional two-year warranty on flash memory that is specifically designed to be pummelled with data. Whether this premium is worth it depends entirely on just how you plan to use a premium SSD.

Enthusiasts who hanker for straight-line SSD speed may need to look elsewhere; PNY's Prevail Elite targets a different market.

The Good

Uses top-notch NAND chips from Intel
Five-year warranty
Promise of 10K P/E cycles

The Bad

Premium price tag
Not as quick as the premium competition

HEXUS Rating

PNY Prevail Elite (240GB)

HEXUS Where2Buy

The PNY Prevail Elite 240GB is available to purchase from Scan Computers*.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

[15/03/2013] Pauline Monin, Product Manager PC Components, PNY Europe

Firstly, on behalf of PNY, I want to thank HEXUS for the thorough test of our drive. We’re always happy to work with your team.

We want take this opportunity to reinforce who we’ve designed the Prevail Elite for. This SSD is part of our professional range (our consumer range is made of the XLR8 and XLR8 Pro series), and we’ve built it for the pro community’s needs and requirements. Whilst there are controllers that give quicker performance, our vision and ambition for the Prevail Elite was always for servers, RAID configurations, networking and even cloud storage. For pros that need and place endurance at the top of their priority list. The Prevail Elite’s enterprise grade memory means that endurance will be more than 3 times better than the vast majority of consumer SSDs currently on the market.

If it falls within your price range as a consumer, and you’re looking for a drive with 10K rated eMLC memory, LSI SandForce performance and a five year warranty, you’ve found your SSD ! But we want to reinforce that this was designed with endurance and reliability for a professional use in mind.

Finally, to explain one small criticism in the review, we offer an upgrade kit with various accessories instead of bundling them with the drive. This is simply because we want to keep prices of the drive itself to a minimum, and assume that a strong percentage of enthusiasts will already have the accessories required.