I purchased this product on Cyber Monday, after a ton of research, to replace my secondary mechanical drive that was on its way out. I wanted a fast but more importantly reliable replacement drive that was also affordable; something hard to come by in the SSD market. I have to say I was skeptical of buying a PNY product at first, but after reading reviews online and finding out that they're a USA based company that assembles their products here, I decided to pull the trigger.This review won't really focus on packages or aesthetics, because it really doesn't matter. That being said, the packaging was nice and attractive. The drive came with a spacer to make it compatible with taller 2.5" mounts. The SSD also has 4 holes on the bottom that you can use to screw it into a 3.5" bay if you choose. Build quality is nice and feels substantial. Installation is plug and play. I did NOT install Windows on this drive, I simply formatted it with NTFS and I'm using it as a backup drive for music, pictures, non-essential programs, etc.Now we get into the meat and potatoes of the review. I've run a few benchmarks on both this 240GB PNY CS2111 drive and my 250GB Samsung 840 EVO for reference. I've compiled the data from the benchmarks in Excel and created easy-to-read charts to illustrate the performances of the PNY drive. Please check the attached pictures.I ran USB Flash Benchmark, a benchmark program really meant to test flash drives, to check small file performance. Using a 100mb file, I ran the test three times and took the average of each metric and used those to make the graphs. As you can see, write performance is decent, but the 840 EVO absolutely dwarfs it in terms of sheer performance. What's interesting is that while the PNY drive maintains a steady ~290 MB/s write speed, the EVO struggles with smaller write chunks dropping from 450 MB/s to nearly 350 MB/s. Read performance, however, is much more impressive. It can definitely hang with the 840 EVO in read speed performance, beating it in certain situations. There was a curious drop in speed with 1MB chunks, which I found odd. Even then, at it's slowest, the sequential read speed of this drive seems to sit around 430 MB/s.Next, I ran AS SSD Benchmark, a program specifically designed to benchmark SSDs. This program used a, much larger, 1GB file for its tests. Again, I ran the test three times and averaged the results. As you can see from the attached charts, Read speeds are nearly identical between the 840 EVO and PNY CS2111, which, needless to say, is very impressive when you consider the price. The write speeds, again, are where the PNY drive falls short to the EVO, coming in at almost 160MB/s slower than the it's competitor in sequential write speeds. What's surprising is that the PNY drive is actually faster than the EVO in 4k Queued Random Write tests by a fair margin. The benchmark can also convert these values to IOPS. The drive is listed as being capable of hitting 71,000/72,000 write/read IOPS, but real world values appear to be much lower. Both the Samsung and PNY perform well, registering at a little over 60,000 IOPS read. Again, the PNY comes out on top in write IOPS by nearly 10,000. Either way, the drives perform much slower than advertised. Almost by half.Additionally, I ran the benchmark function on Samsung Magician and these are the following results:Samsung 840 EVO:Sequential Read: 540 MB/sSequential Write: 469 MB/sRandom Read: 43534 IOPSRandom Write: 37178 IOPSPNY CS2111:Sequential Read: 497 MB/sSequential Write: 310 MB/sRandom Read: 44098 IOPSRandom Write: 31622 IOPSOverall, when you consider the price, you can't not be impressed. Performance is great; sometimes edging out the Samsung 840 EVO in synthetic tests. The drive comes well packaged, works right out of the box, and stays cool under load. On top of all this is a 4 year warranty, that actually beats other competitors offers. Absolutely no complaints at all. Reliability is a big factor for me, however. So hopefully I will not be editing this review in the future with bad news.