Saturday, December 14th 2024
SK hynix Platinum P51 Launches in South Korea
Although it was revealed back in March this year, SK hynix new Platinum P51 PCIe 5.0 has only just now launched in South Korea and the specs have been boosted since March. The official sequential read speed is now rated at 14.7 GB/s vs. 13.5 GB/s in March and likewise, the sequential write speed has increased to 13.4 GB/s from 11.5 GB/s. We're also looking at a random IOPS read speed of up to 2,300k and random write IOPS of up to 2,400k. This compares really favourably compared to Phison E26 based SSDs, especially the random IOPS are very impressive.
However, it's not all good news, as the endurance tops out at 1200 TBW on the 2 TB SKU, which is pretty much what every other modern SSD offers today and somewhat disappointing considering that we're looking at SK hynix 238 layer 3D TLC NAND here. The 2 TB SKU is also the largest size available for now and the Platinum P51 will also come in 1 TB and 500 GB flavours. Another not so great, is the 10 W power consumption, even though SK hynix claims it's industry leading, but we know that this isn't true, as the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller is more power efficient than that. The drive has already been quickly benchmarked by South Korean hardware site Quasar Zone and it delivers in terms of the claimed speeds from the manufacturer, at least according to the CrystalDiskMark numbers. No pricing has tipped up as yet, so we'll have to wait to see how competitive the drive will be in an already crowded market. However, it's worth keeping in mind that SK hynix tends to charge a premium for its SSDs over many of its competitors.
Update Dec 14th: The 2 TB SKU has a retail price of 473,000 Korean Won, which equals about US$330, making it prohibitively expensive at the moment, even compared to most other PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the market. The 1 TB SKU comes in at 279,000 Korean Won, or about US$195. The Korean prices include 10% VAT/sales tax.
Sources:
@harukaze5719 on X/Twitter, Quasar Zone, additional details by @harukaze5719, additional details by @harukaze5719
However, it's not all good news, as the endurance tops out at 1200 TBW on the 2 TB SKU, which is pretty much what every other modern SSD offers today and somewhat disappointing considering that we're looking at SK hynix 238 layer 3D TLC NAND here. The 2 TB SKU is also the largest size available for now and the Platinum P51 will also come in 1 TB and 500 GB flavours. Another not so great, is the 10 W power consumption, even though SK hynix claims it's industry leading, but we know that this isn't true, as the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller is more power efficient than that. The drive has already been quickly benchmarked by South Korean hardware site Quasar Zone and it delivers in terms of the claimed speeds from the manufacturer, at least according to the CrystalDiskMark numbers. No pricing has tipped up as yet, so we'll have to wait to see how competitive the drive will be in an already crowded market. However, it's worth keeping in mind that SK hynix tends to charge a premium for its SSDs over many of its competitors.
Update Dec 14th: The 2 TB SKU has a retail price of 473,000 Korean Won, which equals about US$330, making it prohibitively expensive at the moment, even compared to most other PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the market. The 1 TB SKU comes in at 279,000 Korean Won, or about US$195. The Korean prices include 10% VAT/sales tax.
27 Comments on SK hynix Platinum P51 Launches in South Korea
Controller manufacturers prefer to make them with high electrical consumption rather than making them in more advanced lithography with lower consumption.
Why downsizing to max 2 TB? Why are we going backwards? How far back will this go?
640Kb should be enough for anyone?
PCIe 5 0 drives really offer nothing compelling to your average user, just as 4.0 drives really didn't either over 3.0 drives....in fact, I'd be willing to bet that absent a large, sequential file transfer, your average user cannot differentiate between the three, but if you've ever had a chance to use a PC with an optane drive as the OS drive, you can perceive a difference (or at least I've convinced myself of that after getting my hands on a discount Intel 905p a few months back).
As it stands now, I feel like the real upgrades in consumer SSDs are more dependent on NAND manufacturers releasing new generations of NAND with increased MT/s (I think the fastest consumers see is 2400 MT/s but I think there is 3200MT/s out there) as opposed to increasing the PCIe bandwidth, either way....I want all SLC drives.
www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/solidigm-d7-ps1010-1-9-tb.d2148
This is going to make it more efficient than first gen5 disks, not cooler.
www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/sk-hynix-platinum-p51-1-tb.d1967
Unlike Phison, in the past SK Hynix did not recycle an old gen controller for newer gen disks. That's what we experienced on the E16 (revised E12) and the E26 (E18+ coprocessor).
It usually goes like Warranty valid for 5 year or up to 1200TBW which ever comes first.
If you are heavy duty user they want to escape warranty responsibility as soon as possible and cap you out at 1200TBW for warranty claims.
The true TBW is probably at least double or more for the 2TB.
www.cdw.com/product/solidigm-d7-p5810-800-gb-solid-state-drive-2.5-internal-u.2-pci-expre/8141690
Since this looks fantastic from WD
www.anandtech.com/show/21508/western-digital-previews-m2-2280-pcie-50-x4-nvme-client-ssd-not-ready
Added pricing as well.
A 800GB SLC drive that was available for $120 ($0.15 per GB or 3 times the TLC pricing) would be very attractive.
Is there no way to make the SLC on a newer node (unless you mean something different by more expensive)? I would think that SLC NAND is simpler to make than MLC or TLC or QLC NAND as it is an older technology.
This is true of some other parts that goes into chips as well, such as analogue bits and some RF components.
Right now, the NAND guys are using some kind of 10-20 nm tech to make the NAND dies, but no-one has gone below 10 nm so far and this is part of the reason that they started stacking the NAND dies into 3D NAND chips, as this allowed for several NAND dies to be stacked on top of each other, which lead to greater capacity per chip, as you most likely know.
You could obviously take 3D TLC and use it as SLC, it's done quite often, least not as cache, but you lose out a lot of space and you won't gain that much in terms of performance over a drive that does SLC caching.
The short answer is, no, there are no new nodes that would help make it cheaper to produce SLC NAND.