Extremely fast SSD – SK Hynix Platinum P41

The Platinum P41 PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD from SK Hynix combines performance, durability, and technical power. The company’s premier retail offering is the Platinum series, which targets PC gamers and multimedia producers. Amazon now sells the Platinum P41, SK Hynix’s first PCIe 4.0 SSD with superior 176-layer NAND flash memory, in capacities of 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB. The Platinum P41 is made to outperform other PCIe 4.0 SSDs with sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,000 and 6,500 MB/s, respectively, and an industry-leading endurance rating of up to 1,200 TBW. The Platinum P41 also features an internal “Aries” controller made by SK Hynix, which helps to the quicker read/write rates.

The SK Hynix Platinum P41 costs approximately $105 (500GB), $150 (1TB), and $260 (2TB)., and has a 5-year warranty. We will concentrate on the 2TB capacity model in this review.
This device offers adequate durability levels and PCIe 4.0 performance levels exceeding 7 GB/sec because it has its own NAND and PCIe Gen 4.0 controller. Although the P41 is a premium drive with premium rates, the 2 TB variant only costs 13 cents per GB. The ACNS075 PHC631.00S-1 controller and capacities of up to 2TB were also designed with power efficiency and consistent performance in mind. 176-layer TLC NAND and the “Aries” controller from SK Hynix are both found onboard. Details about the P41’s controller are scant, however it appears to have a 4-channel design that is quite similar to the P31. Additionally, a 1GB DDR4 DRAM cache is incorporated into the disk. The Platinum P41 can accomplish sequential read rates of up to 7,000 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 6,500 MB/s, according to SK Hynix. IOPS values for random reads and writes are 1,400K and 1,300K, respectively. The NAND density of the P41, which is impressively greater at 176 layers, has already been mentioned. A desirable endurance rating has been achieved by the SK Hynix Platinum P41 after 1,000 hours of high-temperature operating life (HTOL) testing.
A desirable endurance rating has been achieved by the SK Hynix Platinum P41 after 1,000 hours of high-temperature operating life (HTOL) testing. The 2 TB model’s TBW rating is 1200 TBW, while the 1 TB model’s TBW rating is 750 TBW. TBW stands for TeraBytes Written, which is the total amount of data that a company is willing to guarantee will be written to the SSD. The performance will vary slightly with volume size; however, the faster it is, the more volume there really is. The SSD is an M.2 2280 form factor Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe 1.4) SSD. A decent SATA3 SSD today delivers performance numbers that are simply excellent, but with the more specialized NVMe SSDs, performance may be multiplied by 14x, which offers impressive numbers.

Are 7000MB/sec storage devices truly necessary?
To get the most out of this high-performance product, which is frequently measured synthetically, you’d need to put it through rigorous workloads. Your PC won’t start up any faster because your operating system is usually the bottleneck, but your PC games will load a little bit quicker and your programs will start up just as fast as an NVMe SSD with read/write speeds of around 2 GB/sec.

It’s fair to say that the SK Hynix P41 is a performance beast. True, there are a few somewhat faster solutions if you look at raw, sustained performance measures. But when access times are taken into account, we now have a new top contender. A five-year warranty and excellent TBW values make this a very intriguing offer. For the 1TB and 2TB variants, SK Hynix offers 750 TBW and 1200 TBW (Terabytes Written), along with an MTBF of up to 1,500,000 Hours (Mean(ingless) Time Between Failures). We’ve already discussed endurance a lot, or how many times NAND cells can be written before they burst and split into little fragments. More NAND cells result from larger volume sizes, which increases endurance. The question is, how long will a 1200 TWB storage unit last before NAND flash cells become unusable? Well, if you’re an extremely serious user, you might be writing 50 GB per day (regular users probably won’t even write that much in a week), but based on that number, 50 GB x 365 days is 18.25 TB written annually. Thus, the 1TB SSD will only be used for half as long, or more than 65 years. Again, 50 GB of writing is a really serious value. photo: SK hynix

The SK Hynix Platinum P41 is an extremely fast product. The range of the overall read performance is between 3GB and well over 6.5 GB/sec. Performance was really strong, and access times (latency) was extremely high, according to trace testing. You may contest some of the continuous workloads, but would you ever distinguish between 6 and 7 GB/s? It seems that access times slow down when there are additional NAND layers. We’re talking millisecond intervals here. Larger volume size SSDs are beneficial in this situation since more NAND channels can be used.
The Platinum P41 2TB SSD drive from SK Hynix is really fantastic. The company’s first 176-layer NAND drive, the Platinum P41, has entered a somewhat crowded market. Although performance results were inconsistent throughout our tests, there appears to be a new king in town when it comes to access times and real-world traces. At times, it was by far the highest performing drive. The P41 has a good price/performance ratio while not being the best in terms of continuous performance, costing about $105 (500GB), $150 (1TB), and $260 (2TB). At 13 cents per GB, the 2TB model is the most cost-effective. The thermal testing results are satisfactory; however, if you intend to run heavy workloads, make sure you place this device underneath a heatsink.