A High End SSD from a Brand You’ve Never Heard Of! SOLIDIGM P44 Pro Review

This is the Solidigm P44 Pro, a pretty high end PCIe Gen 4×4 SSD with rather impressive quoted specs – up to 7GB/s reads and 6.5GB/s writes, and a better-than-average 750 TBW endurance rating. And all of this is from a brand you’ve likely never heard of – Solidigm. Except, you actually have heard of them. See they are the ones making the Intel 660p and 670p SSD now, plus these P44 Pro drives made of 100% SKHynix chips. That’s because Solidigm’s parent company is SK Hynix, one of the largest NAND manufacturers in the world. The name, they say, is a fusion of “solid”, like solid state drive, and “paradigm”, as in they offer a paradigm shift in SSD tech. Amazing.

That might explain why when you peel back the rather stylish sticker, you’ll find an SK Hynix PCIe Gen 4×4 controller, 1GB of SK Hynix LPDDR4 as your DRAM cache, and two SK Hynix in this case 512GB 176 layer TLC NAND flash packages. This is an SK Hynix drive with a new badge, but that’s a good thing. SK Hynix are a top shelf NAND maker, so them creating a new brand to more comfortably sell drives like these at more consumer-friendly prices is great! So, with the introductions out of the way, let’s take a look at this thing and see if it is actually worth your cash!

Solidigm has a 21 page manual on how to test their drive where they show the 1TB model I have here hitting 7GB/s on reads in Iometer, and 6.5GB/s in writes. In my case, using Crystal Disk Mark, the closest I could get was 6.6GB/s on reads and 6.2GB/s on writes. To be clear, that is still mind-boggling performance, but it isn’t quite what they claim. Compare that to the Silicon Power XS70 I reviewed recently which hit 7.4GB/s on reads, with albeit slower writes at 5.9GB/s instead, and you’ll struggle to find a metric here that the Solidigm wins on. The only, and actually pretty major win for the Solidigm is in the sequential reads with a queue depth of 1 and 1 thread, where the Solidigm hit 5.5GB/s, compared to just 3.6GB/s on the XS70.

Moving onto AS SSD, you’ll see again we are nowhere near the quoted figures of any of these drives. The P44 Pro sits in the middle of the pack, although towards the back of the second generation Gen4x4 drives. Its read and write performance is almost matched though, compared to say the Samsung 980 Pro which has a slightly better read performance, with much, much slower writes. With a 4KB block size, the P44 Pro is again at the back of the newer Gen4x4 pack, with slower read performance than even the first generation Sabrent Rocket 4. With 64 threads the performance improves dramatically, and the P44 Pro actually beats out everything here in read performance by several hundred megabytes per second. Write performance is pretty good too, although still being beaten out by the Silicon Power XS70 and Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus.

In ATTO, again you’ll find the P44 Pro in the upper bands alongside the other Gen4x4 drives, although it’s on the lower end of those. It peaked at around 5.8GB/s writes, and 6.1GB/s reads. Compare that to the XS70 or Rocket 4 Plus which are sitting at nearly 7GB/s, it’s not quite at the same level. Interestingly, it did manage to record the best 8KB block size read I’ve tested, at 113MB/s, compared to more like 90MB/s for pretty much anything else. Really, that low end especially on reads is pretty strong, being on the upper end across the 512B to 8KB block size range.

All of that might explain why in my file duplication test, which stresses reads and writes simultaneously, the P44 Pro sat at over 2.1GB/s, where drives like the XS70 generally sat slightly below 2GB/s. That’s one of the best results I’ve had here, and would suggest that the real world performance is arguably better than what the synthetic tests would have you believe. It is worth noting that on this 1TB model the SLC cache runs out after 150GB of writes in quick succession, but it’s “off peak” performance is somewhere around 1GB/s, which is about what a Gen3 SSD can do at it’s best, so I’m not exactly mad about that.

All in all, the P44 Pro is a pretty decent drive. It’s not the absolute fastest thing on the planet, although it’s real world performance is more than you might expect. The only catch is its price tag. Its standard pricing is £125 for this 1TB model, which is a touch more than the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, although I should note that at the time of filming it’s marked down to £107 instead. For that price I’d have no problem recommending it, although it is worth noting the MSI Spatium M480 drive is currently just £97 for a pretty equal SSD so I’d actually put my money there instead, but yeah overall I’d say the Solidigm P44 Pro is a good choice, especially at that discounted price.