At GTC 2025, PNY, which is interestingly short for "Paris and New York", has announced its new CS2342 NVMe SSD today. This is the company's first such SSD that brings the M.2 2230 form factor and is designed with handheld gaming in mind.
The CS2342 brings PCIe Gen4 speeds to the likes of Steam Deck, Asus' ROG Ally, and MSI's Claw. While the Deck runs on Valve's own SteamOS, the ROG Ally and the Claw run Windows 11. Performance on the latest Windows OS is still a matter of debate as even today, Windows 10 appears to be the faster OS.
It is noteworthy here that the Asus ROG Ally X is compatible with M.2 2280 and does require a 2230 SSD.
The PNY CS2342 is an NVMe 1.4 (latest spec is NVMe version 2.1) drive and promises maximum sequential read speeds of up to 7300 MB/s and maximum sequential write speeds of up to 6000 MB/s. PNY did not disclose the input-output per second (IOPS) throughput for random reads and writes.
This drive does not come with its own DRAM and thus relies on system memory for caching with the help of HMB (host memory buffer) technology.
Other technical specifications include a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) value of 1,500,000 Hours. We reached out to PNY regarding the endurance of the drive and its subsequent TBW (terabytes written) value. We will update this post once we hear back.
The new PNY CS2342 is available in two capacities, 1TB and 2TB, and they are priced at MSRP of $69.99 and $134.99 respectively.
Update: The TBW values of the 1TB and 2TB CS2342 are 600 and 1200 respectively.
0 Comments - Add comment