Product Showcase

Product Showcase

The tested unit then; you should easily be able to place the M.2 unit into a compatible NVMe protocol motherboard. Most motherboard chipsets support it. You should, however, check out with the motherboard manufacturer if you have an x4 lane PCIe Gen 3.0 version with NVMe protocol support. Of course, these SSDs are backward compatible thus PCIe Gen 2.0 will work as well, however, the interconnect is halved in bandwidth per generation and that has an extensive effect on performance. 

The latest Windows 10/11 iteration has an up-to-date NVMe 1.4 protocol driver natively, so you do not need to install a 3rd party driver. The 2TB model has 1GB of DRAM (Hynix) as cache, and 2x NAND chips (176L) (one side).

The compact M.2 2280 form factor ensures compatibility with the next-generation desktop and mobile platforms that support the M.2 PCIe slot and interface. The 80 on 2280 is short for 80mm, aka, that is the length of the card, and 2280, you guessed it now .. 22mm for its width. The heatsink does raise a new concern, it's higher and very low PCIe devices could be blocked albeit there was enough clearance for graphics cards that we quickly inserted to check that out.

The SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB is a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) drive. Most other PCIe 4.0 SSDs include a cooling option, but the P41 does not. Remember that when we get down to heat testing, we recommend you place this unit underneath a heatsink if you plan complex workloads.

The SK Hynix Platinum P41, which comes with a 5-year warranty, costs give or take $105 (500GB), $150 (1TB), and $260. (2TB). For this article, we will focus on the 2TB capacity.

The 1200 TBW for this 2 TB model ain't exactly on the shy side. The SSD consists out of all SK Hynix chips one of them is a GB of DRAM cache, which stores the mapping tables.

And that's SK Hynix NAND right there, 176-Layers 3D TLC. 2TB for two chips, that's a gigantic 1024 GB per NAND IC.