SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD Review - Specifications & Features

Specifications & Features

The "Platinum P41" PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD from SK hynix combines technical power with performance and durability. The Platinum series is the company's flagship retail portfolio, geared at gamers and content creators looking to boost PC performance. The Platinum P41, SK hynix's first PCIe 4.0 SSD built with better 176-layer NAND flash memory, is now available on Amazon in the in capacities of 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB. With sequential read rates of up to 7,000 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 6,500 MB/s, as well as an industry-leading endurance rating of up to 1,200 TBW, the Platinum P41 is designed to surpass other PCIe 4.0 SSDs. The Platinum P41 also has an SK hynix in-house "Aries" controller, which contributes to the quicker read/write rates.

The series will be fitted with TLC written 3D NAND flash memory (vertically stacked over 176-layers). This allows the company to offer proper storage volumes. So instead of using Planar NAND, 3D NAND is used. 3D TLC NAND is physical vertical NAND cell stacking not to be confused with chip stacking in a multi-chip package. In 3D NAND, NAND layers, not chips, are stacked in a single IC. The good news is continued cost reduction, smaller die sizes and more capacity per NAND chip. Also, installed NAND toolsets in the wafer fabs can, for the most part, be reused, thereby extending the useful life of fab equipment. Unleashed by the PCIe 4.0 ready AMD B550/X570 chipset and Intel Rocket Lake-S / Z590, the SSD reaches up to an advertised 7000 MB/sec sequential read – fourteen times the performance of many SATA SSDs and seventy times faster than some hard disk drives. The performance stems from the hugely increased bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 (PCI-Express Generation 4), a feature that will be made available to customers for the first time as part of the AMD X570 chipset and 3rd Generation AMD Ryzen Desktop Processors. Easily fitting into a PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, the NVMe interface has been bumped upwards to the new 1.4 protocol and high-density TLC NAND combine with a fast controller to enable a new level of single-drive SSD performance. Boasting staggering numbers.

"We are delighted to introduce the Platinum P41, the first of our Platinum series of SSDs to drive the strongest PCIe Gen4 bandwidth experience for computing needs. P41 also inherits the power efficiency and stability of our existing lineup, keeping with SK hynix's rich history of delivering excellent solutions for consumer electronics," Dae Jung Cho, Head of SSD Marketing at SK hynix, said. Furthermore, the Platinum P41 has the highest-end throughput on the PCIe 4.0 interface, with up to 1,400K IOPS in random reads and up to 1,300K IOPS in random writes. The P41 is subjected to 1,000 hours of high-temperature operating life (HTOL) testing to assure reliability, and it has a mean duration between failures of 1.5 million hours (MTBF). SK Hynix offers a five-year warranty on the Platinum P41. The prices are :

• 2TB: $259.99 / 13 Cents per GB
• 1TB: $149.99 / 15 Cents per GB
• 500GB: $104.99 / 21 Cents per GB

Obviously, street prices could very well be a notch lower, but at 13 cents per GB for the 2TB model, things become very attractive.