SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD Review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

The SK Hynix P41 is somewhat of a performance monster. True, if you examine raw, sustained performance measures, there are somewhat speedier options available. However, when access times are considered, we have a new number one. Excellent TBW values and a five-year warranty make this a genuinely intriguing offering. In conclusion, we will again discuss relativity, as breaking the 7 GB/sec barrier does not necessarily result in a significantly faster gaming PC. This is a basic fact. The good news is that SK Hynix does not demand exorbitant prices for this exceptional product. Yes, this 7 GB/sec NVMe SSD is costly, but at approximately 13 cents per gigabyte (USD / 2TB model), I am not at all dissatisfied. This SSD features TLC writing, an extended lifespan, and a 5-year warranty. At that price, it would be difficult to dislike this product.

Do we really need 7000MB/sec storage units?

Um no? This is a premium performance product, often synthetically measured, and you'd need serious workloads to get the best out of it. Your PC isn't going to boot faster as 9 out of 10 times your OS is the bottleneck, your PC games will load a fraction of a second faster, and your applications load up just as quickly as an NVMe SSD with reads/writes in the 2 GB/sec marker. That is the honest truth. However, the same folk that purchases a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti or Radeon RX 6950 XT combined with some sort Core i9 or Ryzen 9 series processor, it's for those guys where that last sniff of performance matters, whether that is realistic or not, I'll leave open to discussion.  In retrospect, however, we do have technologies coming up like DirectStorage. This will allow the graphics card to load textures directly from the SSD bypassing the processor, freeing up processor cycles for other tasks, and speeding up texture load times. In this way, if they have a fast M.2 disk, they will be in the game in less than 5 seconds even on large maps, a negligible time compared to the loading times we are used to today. That technology will be released in the Windows 11 timeframe.

Endurance

SK Hynix offers 750 TBW and 1200 TBW (Terabytes Written) for the 1TB and 2TB models, coupled with an MTBF of up to 1,500,000 Hours (Mean(ingless) Time Between Failures). We talked so much about this in the past already, endurance, the number of times NAND cells can be written before they burst and shatter into small pieces (well, they just die and are mapped out, any data present on that cell is written to a healthy one). Bigger volume sizes mean more NAND cells; more NAND cells thus increase endurance. . So how long does a 1200 TWB storage unit last before NAND flash cells go the way of the dodo? Well, if you are a really extreme user, you might be writing 50 GB per day (normal users likely won't even write that per week), but based on that value, 50GB x 365 days= 18.25 TB per year written. So that's over 65 years of usage, half that for the 1TB SSD. And again, writing 50 GB per day is a very devoted value. 

Thermals

The controller is not fitted with a heatsink or thermal sticker, the controller as such gets hot. In the end, it could result in some thermal throttling under an extreme workload. Keep this SSD under a motherboard or 3rd party heatsink, and this will not be an issue. We always advise a little bit of airflow over your SSDs also.

Performance

The P41 is a blazingly fast product. Overall read performance range anywhere from 3GB to well over 6.5 GB/sec. Trace testing revealed that performance was very strong, and access times (latency) are wild. you can argue some of the sustained workloads but would you ever notice the difference between 6 or 7 GB/s. The more NAND layers there are, it appears that access times become slower. We're talking milli-fractions of a second here. Bigger volume size SSDs help here because more NAND channels can be utilized. 

Concluding

The SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB drive is awesome. Throughout the majority of our testing, it was competing with the best NVMe SSDs out there. Results vary depending on the benchmark and test suite though. The Platinum P41 is the company's first 176-layer NAND drive to join a rather saturated market. Performance results were a little erratic during our testing, but at times it was the highest performing drive by a wide margin, especially in access times and real-world traces we seem to have a new king in town. While not the top dog in sustained performance, the P41 makes up with a decent price/performance ratio, costing around $105 (500GB), $150 (1TB), and $260 (2TB). The 2 TB model is the most attractive at 13 cents per GB. The thermal testing results are okay, just make sure you place this unit underneath a heatsink if you plan to run massive workloads. Most end users will not have any issues as long as a little bit of airflow is provided to the drive, that in most scenarios is already very sufficient. Definitely recommended by Guru3D.com

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