With the Platinum P41, SK hynix returns to the spotlight. Their newest SSD offering finally brings support for the fast PCI-Express Gen 4 interface—something their competitors have offered for almost two years. Besides Samsung and Micron/Crucial, Hynix is a member of the elite club of SSD makers able to build the whole SSD with in-house components. The three major components on a solid-state drive are the controller, NAND flash, and DRAM cache—Hynix makes all three of those. Especially in these challenging times is it of enormous benefit if you can just source everything internally. No doubt, if the Hynix SSD division wants to buy chips from the Hynix flash division, they'll get a good price and the best possible treatment. I don't know if Hynix plans to sell their controller to third parties or whether they will keep it in-house only. Selling the controller would definitely shake up things in the SSD space, which is currently dominated by Phison and their amazing E18 PCIe 4.0 controller. WD and Samsung use their controller designs for in-house products only.

Synthetic numbers of the Hynix Platinum P41 are very impressive and always near the top of our leaderboards, fighting it out with the best Gen 4 drives. The differences are very small, usually within a few percentages. It's good to see the Platinum P41 excel in the important "mixed" tests, which try to mimic the behavior of a typical consumer system where drive activity is not 100% read or 100% write, but rather a mix of the two.

The main focus of our testing is our extensive real-life test suite, which runs the actual applications with the drive filled to 80% of its total capacity. This puts additional stress on the various algorithms and is much more realistic than reviewing a nearly empty drive. Here, the Platinum P41 can beat every other drive we ever tested and sets a new performance record. Compared to the Samsung 980 Pro, the performance uplift is 2%, and against the Kingston KC3000 and similar Phison E18+Micron 176-layer drives, the difference is 2%, too. The WD Black SN850 has been the fastest SSD we ever tested until today as the Hynix P41 is slightly faster. These are averages, though. If we take a closer look at individual results, we can see that especially read-heavy workloads, ideally with lots of random IO, are extremely fast. This is exactly the performance profile that matters the most for the responsiveness of a consumer system—good job, SK hynix! Writes seem a tiny bit better optimized on competitors, but it's not a big difference. Compared to Gen 3 drives, the P41 offers 5–10% additional performance, 15% compared against value Gen 3 or QLC. Compared to SATA drives, the performance uplift is around 25–30%.

Thanks to a large SLC cache, the Platinum P41 has excellent sustained write performance. When mostly empty, the drive will store incoming data as SLC first, which is very fast at over 4.7 GB/s, but consumes three times the storage because it fills each three-bit TLC cell with just a single bit. This mode is active until half the drive is filled, 296 GB in SLC mode consume 890 GB TLC capacity. Once that margin is crossed, the drive will write to TLC directly while also flushing data out of SLC into TLC so that there's enough space for incoming writes. In this state, you're still getting 1.7 GB/s write speeds, which is very good. Filling the whole capacity completes at 1.95 GB/s on average, which is better than nearly all SSDs we've tested. Only some Phison E18 + 176-layer B47R drives can beat that by a significant margin.

Thermal performance of the Hynix Platinum P41 is impressive. The Hynix PCIe 4.0 controller is a highly energy efficient design that doesn't put out a lot of heat. In our worst-case thermal loading test, we couldn't get the drive to throttle even when throwing tons of data at it with no airflow or heatsink. As such, Hynix excluding a heatsink with the P41 is perfectly fine—it's not needed. While some other, mostly smaller SSD makers pick very conservative thermal limits for their drives, this is no issue on the P41. Hynix chose good limits. We measured 93°C maximum temperature during our stress test with no airflow or heatsink, which sounds like a lot, but is perfectly fine. Remember, these are the people who engineered and fabricated the controller, NAND flash, and DRAM on the drive—they know the limits of the circuits they designed. One reason this drive might still need a heatsink is the PlayStation 5 crowd.

Hynix wants $260 for the 2 TB version of the P41, which isn't exactly cheap, but not unreasonable either, given the drive's performance and positioning. The strongest competitors are no doubt the Samsung 980 Pro ($290) and WD Black SN850 ($230). While the Samsung drive is too expensive (it's discounted from time to time), I feel like I would marginally prefer the WD Black if I can save $30—the performance differences are negligible. Other good alternatives are the numerous Phison E18 + Micron 176-layer B47R drives from vendors like Corsair, Silicon Power, Sabrent, Kingston, and others. Those can be found starting at $240 and are definitely worth considering. If you can live with slightly lower performance, the WD Black SN770 2 TB could be an option for $200. While it is DRAM-less, it still offers outstanding performance that rivals much more expensive drives. Of course, there are still all the PCIe 3.0 drives, which are probably fast enough, too, unless you move tons of data all the time, but such a compromise must offer significant cost savings to make it worthwhile.