SK hynix Platinum P51 14 GB/s PCIe Gen 5 SSD Revealed

[TheLostSwede]

SK hynix press release about its upcoming PCB01 PCIe 5.0 SSD was a bit light on details and Anandtech got a closer look at the upcoming drive at GTC 2024. Not entirely unsurprising, the drive will be called the Platinum P51 rather than the PCB01, which is a continuation of the branding SK hynix is using for its current range of SSDs. As we already know, it'll feature a custom SK hynix controller and no further data was revealed to Anandtech, but the publication did manage to get some more details with regards to the NAND flash used.

The Platinum P51 is SK hynix first consumer SSD with its new-ish 238-layer 4D NAND flash based on the company's PUC (peri. under cell) technology, which places the peripheral circuits under the cell array. The official performance figures of the Platinum P51 appears to be somewhat lower than the press release from earlier today stated, with sequential read speeds of up to 13.5 GB/s and sequential write speeds of 11.5 GB/s. SK hynix will apparently release the drive in the typical SSD sizes of 500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB. It'll be interesting how SK hynix in-house controller will compare to the second generation of Phison E26 based drives paired with Micron B58R NAND flash once it becomes available later this year.



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[evernessince]

2TB max is extremely disappointing. With modern AAA games hitting 150 GB plus you cannot store a large game library on this.

 

[ymbaja]

For the love of god can we move beyond 500GB??

 

[notaburner]

2TB max is extremely disappointing. With modern AAA games hitting 150 GB plus you cannot store a large game library on this.

To be fair, gen 5 ssds are complete overkill for games. Gen 4 barely brings any noticeable uplift over Gen 3 for any current titles. Figure the target market for these drives is not for gamers. That said, the capacity is still disappointing for other use cases though.

 

[Leiesoldat]

I think 500 GB is fine for the starting tier, especially if this is the primary OS drive. Almost all motherboards have more than 1 m.2 slot and many ITX boards have another slot on the back. Just build a NAS if you need more than 2 or 4 TB of NVME space; much more cost effective when dealing with 2.5" or 3.5" drives.

Like notaburner said, you don't need Gen5 for games. I'm running Guild Wars 2 world vs. world raids (80 vs. 80 vs. 80 matchups) from a Gen3 NVME drive sitting on a USB connection with no issues.

 

[notaburner]

I think 500 GB is fine for the starting tier, especially if this is the primary OS drive. Almost all motherboards have more than 1 m.2 slot and many ITX boards have another slot on the back. Just build a NAS if you need more than 2 or 4 TB of NVME space; much more cost effective when dealing with 2.5" or 3.5" drives.

Like notaburner said, you don't need Gen5 for games. I'm running Guild Wars 2 world vs. world raids (80 vs. 80 vs. 80 matchups) from a Gen3 NVME drive sitting on a USB connection with no issues.

Only point where gen 4 might become a requirement is for games that implement direct storage. Only a few have launched with support so far and I don't recall them really seeing much benefit with faster drives. Releasing a game that requires gen 4 drives or faster seems like a bad idea just in terms of restricting your user base to those with high enough specs. Hell, we're just getting to games having "SSD" in their system requirements now, with no specification for drive speed.

Seems like cpu/board vendors have brought gen 5 to consumer platforms just to tick a marketing box. If they were truly necessary/in demand, it wouldn't have taken years after the launch of compatible platforms for the drive manufacturers to finally start producing the drives.

 

[Nater]

Only point where gen 4 might become a requirement is for games that implement direct storage. Only a few have launched with support so far and I don't recall them really seeing much benefit with faster drives. Releasing a game that requires gen 4 drives or faster seems like a bad idea just in terms of restricting your user base to those with high enough specs. Hell, we're just getting to games having "SSD" in their system requirements now, with no specification for drive speed.

Seems like cpu/board vendors have brought gen 5 to consumer platforms just to tick a marketing box. If they were truly necessary/in demand, it wouldn't have taken years after the launch of compatible platforms for the drive manufacturers to finally start producing the drives.

I don't think we're far off. My kids 1TB SSD's have less than 10% space left. Fortnite. Call of Duty. Red Dead 2. Batman Arkham Asylum.

Boom it's full.

 

[notaburner]

I don't think we're far off. My kids 1TB SSD's have less than 10% space left. Fortnite. Call of Duty. Red Dead 2. Batman Arkham Asylum.

Boom it's full.

I'm not talking about capacity, just drive speed. Totally agree on the 500gb/1tb drives being inadequate for most people. Mainly just saying there's no point in sacrificing capacity (as there are 4+tb options for gen3/4 drives at much more affordable prices) for gen 5 speeds given they don't provide any tangible performance gains for gaming.

Have a 4tb sn850x as my main game drive and that's about 1/2 full despite my habit of uninstalling games once I'm through with them. Though that approach probably isn't great for people with data caps/limited internet speeds. Also haven't noticed any increase in performance coming from a fairly typical gen 3 drive (just ran out of spare m.2 slots and drive space so needed to upgrade).

 

[Ruru]

To be fair, gen 5 ssds are complete overkill for games. Gen 4 barely brings any noticeable uplift over Gen 3 for any current titles. Figure the target market for these drives is not for gamers. That said, the capacity is still disappointing for other use cases though.

I can't even see any differences in gaming if I compare a modern SATA SSD to a NVMe one. Maybe games load 1-2sec faster, but I'm not testing with a stopwatch.

 

[Minus Infinity]

For the love of god can we move beyond 500GB??

How is this still even an option in 2024. I mean they are literally taking the piss.

 

[jesdals]

Looking forward to see the final production model with its tripple rad aio cooler or tower fin stack mount for descent cooling

 

[phints]

While people are complaining over nonsense I for one am excited this should finally be the first decent PCIe Gen 5 SSD worth looking at. One that has hopefully great 4K RAND performance, doesn't require a fan/comically large heatsink, and overall performs like a Gen 5 should (and not called that but still performing mostly like Gen 4). 2TB is perfect for me no interest in a larger more expensive drive than that.

 

[GabrielLP14]

Ahh...
Can't wait to be able to buy that SSD....

Even though sustained writes ain't something that is the "go to" metric when buying SSDs, one interesting fact is that, for consumers, so far this was apparently the world's fastest Sustained write speeds, at a chinese review of the PCB01, they found out that the 2TB has a Hybrid pSLC Cache of around over 500GB and the Native TLC speeds are above 4.800 MB/s or 4.8GB/s while the copyback / Folding state is over 2.200 MB/s or 2.2 GB/s