While the QLC-based Solidigm P41 Plus didn't really draw much attention, the P44 Pro will definitely make some waves. The company's new flagship SSD is extremely fast and able to compete with the best drives on the market. Besides Samsung and Micron/Crucial, Hynix (Solidigm's parent company) is a member of the elite club of SSD makers able to build a 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.

Synthetic numbers of the P44 Pro 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 percent. It's good to see the P44 Pro do well 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. There's only minor performance differences between the 1 TB and 2 TB versions.

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 Solidigm P44 Pro 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 recently, but the Solidigm P44 Pro 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 Solidigm! Writes seem a tiny bit better optimized on competitors, but it's not a big difference. Compared to Gen 3 drives, the P44 Pro 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 P44 Pro 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, 289 GB in SLC mode consume 870 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 1.97 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. The 1 TB version is a little bit slower here, reaching 1.77 GB/s to fill the whole drive.

Thermal performance of the P44 Pro 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, Solidigm excluding a heatsink with the P44 Pro is perfectly fine—it's not needed. They still mentioned that they are working with retailers on bundling an optional heatsink with the SSD—don't waste your money. While some other, mostly smaller SSD makers pick very conservative thermal limits for their drives, this is no issue on the P44 Pro. Solidigm chose good limits. We measured 89°C maximum temperature during our stress test with no airflow or heatsink, which sounds like a lot, but is perfectly fine. One reason this drive might still need a heatsink is the PlayStation 5 crowd—Sony requires a heatsink for all SSDs in the PS5. I'd probably still try it without heatsink, it should be no problem.

Solidigm wants $235 for the 2 TB version of the P44 Pro, the 1 TB version goes for $130. Both these price points are fair and are in-line with the market when considering the performance offered, but definitely not "disrupting" in any way—seems Solidigm is playing it safe here. The strongest competitors are no doubt the Samsung 980 Pro ($220 / $140) and WD Black SN850 ($230 / $130). Right now the Samsung 2 TB is priced very competitively, but these prices always go up and down, for all vendors. Out of those three I would pick the cheapest, the differences are small enough. The only exception is if you're limited by heat, then the Solidigm P44 Pro is the better choice, because it will run happily without heatsink. Other good options 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 $210 / $105 and are definitely worth considering. If you can live with slightly lower performance, the WD Black SN770 2 TB could be an option for $195 / $100. 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.