SK Hynix Platinum P41 SSD: The pursuit of affordable speed

This top-tier PCIe 4 SSD performs on par with the best around, and is nicely affordable.

- JON L. JACOBI

The SK Hynix Platinum P41 was a pleasant surprise. With many upper crust PCIe 4.0–based 2TB NVMe drives still going for $300 plus, the $260 price tag for the P41 had me thinking it would be an overpriced mid-tier SSD. Instead it turned out to be a nicely priced, top-shelf drive with exceptional performance. My bad. Good on ya, SK Hynix!

DESIGN, PRICE, SPECS

As stated, the 2TB Platinum P41 I tested retails for $260, while the 1TB costs $150, and the 500GB, $105. Those are relatively low prices, representing a clear savings over the Seagate FireCuda 530 (fave. co/3vs8HYl), one of the ultra-fast PCIe 4.0 drives I tested it against. The other rival, Kingston’s KC3000 (fave.co/3OtXlLH), is another bargain of a top-tier drive and one of our favorites because of it.

As to the specs: The Platinum P41 is a standard 2280 (22 mm wide, 80 mm long) form factor, M.2 connected, PCIe 4 x4 NVMe SSD utilizing 176-layer TLC NAND and SK Hynix’s Aries controller. There’s also 1GB of DRAM per 1TB of capacity of primary cache. Secondary cache is TLC as SLC and allotted. The drive is warrantied for 5 years, or 1200 TBW (TeraBytes that can be Written) for the 2TB model, 750 TBW for the 1TB, and 500 TBW for the 500GB drive.

Why the reverse slope on the rating, we can’t say. But TBW generally correlates to price. Unless the company specifically disables writes once the limit is reached (as Apple does), then you might get a considerably longer lifespan.