SK hynix Platinum P41 2TB PCIe NVMe Gen4 M.2 2280 Internal Gaming SSD, Up to 7,000MB/S, Compact M.2 SSD Form Factor SSD - Internal Solid State Drive with 176-Layer NAND Flash

Ive been watching a few videos about the Samsung 990 Pro, and Ive wanted to upgrade to it: from my previous 960 Pro NVMe SSD. The 990 Pro was going to be too expensive, so I started looking at reasonable/comparable alternatives. I had seen the Solidigm P44 Pro, and my initial impressions made me feel that: that would be the route I would likely take. Fortunately, I also noticed that the P44 Pro was the same hardware as this Platinum P41, with just different firmware (allegedly). When Black Friday deals were posted, I noticed that this P41 was listed as on discount, and I decided that: any minor differences between the P44 and P41 were likely not going to impact me; thus, I chose to purchase this drive and have cloned my previous 960 Pro data to this new drive. Unfortunately, I cant comment much on the actual performance because my current system is Gen 3 based. I had explicitly purchased this drive intending to upgrade to a 7950x3D AM5-based platform when my Tax-Return comes back at the start of 23. Im pretty happy with the sale price I could get this drive. It will perform significantly better than my old drive and on par with most of the top-tier Gen 4 drives. Time will tell if there are any longer-term problems, but Im doubtful that this drive will present any issues.

Super expensive, but for my needs, the value of the storage device is fairly met to the price. I payed 102 USD. The instructions for installation get two thumbs up from me even though I didnt need them. Well see how reliable it ends up being, it has only been half a year.

Upgraded my 1TB SSD to 2TB. Process was simple, using SK Hynix cloning software. Device runs at the advertised speeds (checked with ATTO, Black Magic, et al). In two+ months so far, no issues. A no-brainer purchase.

Just built a watercooled MSI Carbon black MB EKWB not sure why the write speed and random read write is so much lower.

I get a solid 7GB/sec read on an AM5 motherboard setup. Game load times are faster and the system feels snappier. Highly recommended.

Blazing fast drive. I added a thin copper heatsink since it is in a laptop. Easy to install [after I got the laptop opened]. I had ordered 2. Both registered and worked great!... except one would skip every few minutes while playing a few different games installed on it. The other had no issues with those same games. I returned the one with the game skipping.

Its hard to argue against Hynix, unless Samsung is having a crazy sale. Even then, you know enthusiast-grade Hynix products arent junk. But I wasnt expecting this to put my venerable 980 Pro to bed. On a lark, I bought two 2TB drives during Amazons Black Friday sale, and my only regret is not buying three. The read speed is neck and neck with the 980 Pro, but the write speed is nearly 2,000 MB/s faster. Thats jaw-dropping. You can see the results in the attached image. Thats on a secondary drive in an MSI Z690 Pro board with no heatsink at all. Not an enthusiast board. Not active cooling. Not even passive cooling (besides the Hynix sticker). Nothing crazy. And just over 7,100 read / 6,700 write is impressive at an enthusiast-grade price. Even a regular price. But at the bargain basement price these were going for? I almost feel like a thief!

After cloning this drive, works flawlessly as my startup drive.

Im very happy with my SSD. SK Hynix definitely made the right decision making and marketing their own SSDs after all these years. It does what it says on the tin, and is priced competitively with the Samsung 980 Gen 4 taking into account the fact the Hynix does not include the heatsink. I bought the Sabrent Rocket heatsink to put on it and that fits and works great as well. Image of speed test included, I got over 6,300 MB/s read speed which is pretty darn close to the 7,000 claimed, my PC is a pretty modest system running a Ryzen 5 5600x, 16GB of DDR4 3600 RAM, and Radeon RX5700 GPU so I would have been surprised to get max speed out of it. As it stands I would highly recommend this to anyone looking for a good M.2 Gen 4 SSD. The 5 year warranty tells you they stand behind their products as well.

Just wanted to submit my experience for those looking for a solid high performance gen 4 SSD. I bought the 2 TB P41 Platiunum and running Crystal Mark benchmark it slightly exceeds the read/write performance stated: I hit just over 7000 read and 6500 write. I saw a lot of complaints about the temperature, but I did not experience any issues there. The hottest my drive got during the benchmark was about 65 degrees celsius, but mostly sitting in the high 50s. Im using a motherboard with a built in standard heatsink cover (metal) with a thermal pad for cooling (came with my motherboard - Asrock Taichi x670e). So, not using any crazy cooling contraptions - just what came with my motherboard and temps are great. That said, for any fast gen 4+ M.2 SSD, you would want to use some form of heatsink to keep it cool. If youre installing it without any heatsink or airflow, then it probably will get warm during intense reads/writes, but as long as you use reasonable thermal transfer interface, its a great drive for the money (I spent just over $200 for the 2 TB version, which is less than most competitors that are slightly slower). One gripe compared to my Saumsung and WD Black drives is that the SK Hynix Drive Manager software is pretty limited. Its not as fleshed-out as the software from Samsung or WD, but its also an SSD, so as long as it performs you really dont need to do much to/with it.