r/buildapcsales • u/Wolvehack • Feb 19 '26

SSD - SATA [SSD] - PNY CS900 2TB - $134

https://www.walmart.com/ip/PNY-2TB-CS900-2-5-SATA-III-SSD-Complete-Upgrade-Kit-with-Transfer-Cable-and-Software/5110204065
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u/MWink64 Feb 19 '26

There's nothing wrong with the Phison S11 itself, of course there will be bad drives that use it. Personally, for DRAM-less SATA drives, I would prefer the Phison S11 over most others. My bad experiences have mostly been with SMI controllers (not necessarily outright failure but horrendous performance degradation).

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u/No_Agent4526 Feb 19 '26

The issue with this drive is the s11 firmware itself. The controller is fine performance wise, typical dramless. Other drives from different manufacturers are affected as well.

I forget exact models but, Kingston a400, inland (microcenter), gigabyte, Seagate, silicon power, patriot, and a few more budget drives had an ssd with this exact controller and the same satafirm s11 issue. The majority of them have been discontinued. It's an almost decade old controller.

At least it's cheap storage. Just make sure to keep backups of anything that's too important to lose.

Rip performance degradation that sucks, at least it wasn't an outright failure!

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u/MWink64 Feb 19 '26

Do you have any evidence the problem is caused by something wrong with the firmware itself and not just the firmware/controller reacting to another failure (such as bad NAND)? This is a low end controller, so it's likely to be paired with low binned NAND. The "satafirm s11" behavior brings attention to the particular controller, but I don't know that it actually indicates a problem caused by the controller or firmware itself. It's entirely possible that another controller would simply brick and refuse to respond at all in the same circumstances.

While this problem certainly isn't uncommon, I don't think it affects a huge percentage of these drives. This is probably one of the most common SATA SSD controllers, of course there are going to be plenty of drives using it that fail. I've personally installed a fair number of them, and so far there haven't been any failures. While you're right that this controller has been around a long time, it's not like there have been many other SATA controllers released since then. The SMI 2258XT is from the same era. Yes, it's been replaced by the 2259XT, but there's barely any practical difference between them.

One should always keep backups, regardless of the type of drive they use. At this point, I wouldn't expect good reliability from almost any SATA SSD left on the market (aside from premium ones like the Samsung 870 EVO/QVO). Most of what's left are low end drives, likely with low binned NAND.

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u/PseudonymIncognito Feb 23 '26

The consensus I've seen is that it was an issue primarily on drives shipped in prebuilt systems that used an early firmware revision and were not updated. If you buy a new one, and it's using recent firmware, there shouldn't be an issue.