Temperature:
While PCIe SSDs like the Platinum P41 offer impressive performance, they also generate a good amount of heat. At idle, the drive's temperature hovered around 37 ºC. When pushed hard, the drive reached temperatures as high as 78 ºC when reading and 77 ºC when writing.
Surprisingly, these temperatures had no impact on the Platinum P41's performance. No matter how hard I pushed it, the drive did not throttle its read or write speeds in any noticeable way.
Final Thoughts:
Despite coming late to the PCIe 4.0 party, SK hynix has really knocked one out of the park with its Platinum P41 SSD. This compact, M.2 form factor drive is powered by SK hynix's own "Aries" controller and is available with up to 2TB of their 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. Combine this with the company's HYPERWRITE cache technology and a PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 1.4 interface and you have one of the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market today. The 2TB version of the Platinum P41 flew through our sequential transfer rate tests, reading at speeds as high as 7,375 MB/s and writing at more than 6,748 MB/s. The drive also did fairly well in our random write tests, producing nearly 168,000 IOPS at low queue depths.
The Platinum P41 is available now in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities and is offered exclusively through Amazon. Prices currently range from $105 up to $260 for the 2TB version reviewed here.
Highs:
- Available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities
- PCIe 4.0 x4 interface with NVMe protocol
- Equipped with 176-Layer 3D TLC NAND
- Excellent sequential and random read and write performance
- Small M.2 2280 form factor
- Features HYPERWRITE cache technology
- Large DRAM cache
- Supports 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption
- Reasonably priced
- 5 year warranty
Lows:
- Gets hot under heavy workloads
- Limited availability
