SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB

Welcome to the big league, SK Hynix…

- JEREMY LAIRD

SK HYNIX isn’t one of the big boys when it comes to consumer SSD branding. But it is one of the heavyweights in NAND flash chips. In fact, SK Hynix is about to have even more weight to throw around thanks to buying Intel’s SSD and flash memory business lock, stock, but minus the Optane barrel, the latter not available on account of being closed down entirely.

Anyway, the company’s relative anonymity as a consumer SSD brand is about to change. The new SK Hynix Platinum P41 is a bit of a beast, a serious attempt at a high-performance M.2 drive. For starters, where the previous generation SK Hynix Gold P31 made do with a PCIe 3.0 interface and a controller chip with just four memory channels, the new P41 gets all the full specs.

SK Hynix says its new Aries controller chip serves up 33 percent faster I/O speeds and double the IOPS of the Cepheus controller. We also know it’s a quad-core design with double the cores of the old Cepheus and ups the memory channel count to eight, which is more in line with the high-performance competition. For the record, SK Hynix allocates 1GB of its own in-house LPDDR4 cache memory per terabyte of flash storage. So, our 2TB review unit is rocking 2GB of cache.