SK Hynix Platinum P41 Review (2TB) – Top Tier Performance

SK Hynix is one of the few companies in the world that you might call “Level One” SSD makers, as in they design their own NAND flash, DRAM and even controllers. Few in the world, save for Kioxia – formerly Toshiba – Samsung and Micron spring to mind, offer that level of vertical integration. Most other brands take a Phison controller, and buy in some DRAM and NAND flash, and stick it all together, so to have something like this, the SK Hynix Platinum P41, an all-SK drive, well that’s something special. This P41 – not to be confused with the Solidigm P41 Plus that we will definitely be coming back to shortly – uses SK’s 176 layer TLC NAND flash, specifically two 1TB packages on this 2TB drive, as well as SK’s own LPDDR4 DRAM cache, and finally SK’s ARIES controller. All of that in a single-sided, 2280 form factor.

Now I mentioned Solidigm there, and that’s frankly a massive part in this story. SK Hynix has made even consumer grade SSDs for a while – in fact this P41 isn’t exactly new launching in 2022 – but also in 2022 SK Hynix bought out Intel’s NAND flash division that brought you the Intel 660p and 670p, and spun that out into “Solidigm” – a mix of “Solid” as in solid state drive, and “paradigm”, as in a paradigm shift in the SSD market. I reviewed their P44 Pro in January last year, and as it turns out, the P44 Pro is just a Platinum P41 is Solidigm drag. It too features an SK Hynix ARIES controller, SK Hynix DRAM, and SK Hynix 176 layer TLC NAND. These are essentially the same drives. 

So, how do they perform? Well, being PCIe Gen 4×4 drives, pretty damn well. Starting with Crystal Disk Mark, you’ll find the P41 sitting at around 6.5GB/s in writes and nearly 7.2GB/s on reads. There is a bit of discrepancy between my P41 and P44 Pro data as the P44 Pro was tested with a slightly different system, and they took the drive back after testing so I can’t re-run those numbers. With that said, they offer pretty close performance, so no big deal there. At a queue depth of one we see the biggest difference between Phison controller based drives and a more ‘true’ Gen4x4 controller like this ARIES drive. The P41 matches the P44 Pro in writes at 4.9GB/s, which is a little down from the Phison based drives, but on reads it’s worlds different at between 5.5 and 6GB/s – almost double the Silicon Power XS70. With random reads and writes, rather than sequential, you always get lower performance, although interestingly both the P44 Pro and Platinum P41 struggle here by comparison. You get around 750MB/s on reads and around 500 MB/s on writes, compared to over 700 MB/s on writes with a Phison based drive, and nearly a gigabyte per second on reads. As lastly for Crystal Disk Mark, random 4K blocks with a queue depth of one sees the P41 second only to the brand new, and DRAMless, Crucial P310 2230 drive, both in reads and writes.

As for AS SSD, you’ll find the P41 up at the top, second only to the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, at least on write performance. AS SSD always runs a little lower than most other tests, so the 5.8GB/s in both reads and writes here is pretty great. With random 4KB blocks we again see the P41 up at the top, this time second to the Crucial P310, with exceptional performance in writes, and average performance in reads. And with 64 threads on the same 4K blocks you’ll find middle-of-the-pack write performance, but actually class-leading performance on reads. It’s the fastest drive I’ve tested in reads, which is pretty impressive. 

And lastly for the synthetic benchmarks, ATTO sees the P41 eke out a lead in read performance over the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, running at just over 7GB/s, and incredibly strong write performance too. It’s clear that the P41 is an incredibly fast drive, and one that offers exceptional performance pretty much across the board.

As for a slightly more real world stress test, I like to duplicate a large dataset of files to stress the drive in reads and writes simultaneously, and continue to copy data until the SLC cache runs out to see the bare NAND performance, and for this P41 we start off incredibly strong with around 3GB/s at the start. That’s excellent, as even the Crucial P310 – one of the fastest drives I’ve tested – runs at around 2.5GB/s with the same test. That is fantastic – and the good news is that the SLC cache, at least on this 2TB model anyway, doesn’t run out for several hundred gigabytes of transfers. Just shy of 300GB, in fact, where it then reverts to between 1 and 1.5GB/s, which again is one of the best results I’ve seen. It’s safe to say that this is an incredibly fast drive.

So, should you get a Platinum P41? Well, yeah. If you want a Gen4x4 drive anyway, it’s one of the fastest, and reasonably priced. Of course you could also get a Solidigm P44 Pro, which at least at the time of filming is like £5 cheaper for the 2TB version than this P41, but both are great, and both are all SK Hynix parts, which I do attach some value to.