Temperature:
While PCIe SSDs like the P44 Pro 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 79 ºC when both reading and writing.
Surprisingly, these temperatures had no impact on the P44 Pro'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:
The P44 Pro is the first SSD from Solidigm to come through the 'Labs and to be honest, they could not have made a better first impression. This compact, M.2 form factor drive is powered by SK hynix's "Aries" controller and is available with up to 2TB of the company's 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. Combine this with Solidigm's proprietary NVMe storage driver 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 P44 Pro flew through our sequential transfer rate tests, reading at speeds as high as 7,411 MB/s and writing at more than 6,756 MB/s. The drive also did fairly well in our random write tests, producing nearly 172,000 IOPS at low queue depths, and took the top spot in PCMark 10's storage benchmark.
The P44 Pro is available now in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. Prices on Amazon.com currently range from $81 up to $220 for the 2TB version reviewed here.
Highs:
- Available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities
- PCIe 4.0 x4 interface with NVMe protocol
- SK hynix Aries controller
- Equipped with 176-Layer 3D TLC NAND
- Excellent sequential and random read and write performance
- Small M.2 2280 form factor
- Large DRAM cache
- Works with Solidigm's Storage Tool and NVMe storage driver
- Supports 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption
- Reasonably priced
- 5 year warranty
Lows:
- Gets hot under heavy workloads
