The keywords are "to me". As an average user and gamer, I wouldn't see the minor differences between the SK Gold and this drive in real life daily use, while the price difference is considerable: $103 for the 1TB SK Gold at the time of writing, and can be had for $90 in some price reductions I've seen from time to time. The Platinum is currently at it's starting price of $150 for the 1TB version; in this case, the P44 would be an obvious winner.
One of the things gets lost in all the SSD hubub about speeds, benchmarks, and endurance as that all the top stuff is not designed for consumers. Including (perhaps especially) gamers who have no business buying it. Of course they'll take your money. But they are built for professional usage situations. For consumers there are some contractors or people who require homesystems as well to do work where these do make sense. There are applications and usage cases where there is a noticeable difference in the speeds here. At the enterpise level where these drives do wear with multiple VMs erased, created, scratch files, imaging constantly, endurance does matter.
But this is simply not for normal users. These drives make as much sense for most people as getting 10gbe and wiring it into the 10gbe port on your switch when of course nothing on your network has one and doesn't do squat when your switch connects to the router at 1gbe and you're router connects to your ISP at not 10gbe either. Unless you are professional and have say a NAS with 10gbe and are constantly writing to the thing.
This is shades of back in the day when we all had shitty DSL and people would load up RAID cards and SAS drives and people would get frustrated that this did nothing for online Deathmatch. Well of course, gaming isn't a professional application at all. And this may load a game faster, but it has no impact on playing the game, getting into a match, or anything your doing day to day. You just nuked ant, congrats!
Kind of sad seeing those tests where everything is relatively close e.g. minor real world improvement between this and a Crucial 2.5” 500 from yesteryear. Is this due to the limited real estate of the M.2 form factor for engineers, or do we have to wait another decade or two for a fundamentally different memory technology?
As stated this is mostly usage case. Simply put gaming and what most people do isn't a real storage system thrasher, it's not enterprise of professional work it's largely all a laughable joke of childs play.
In the enterprise though U.2 is still a thing, and yes the form factors are difference and vastly so. But that would not change anything if all you are doing is loading an OS, using the internet, messing with MS office, and playing games. None of those are going to stress a storage system. All of those cases are "buy the cheapest one that works and that's more than good enough" cases.
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