Temperature:
While PCIe SSDs like the Gold P31 offer impressive performance, they also generate a good amount of heat. At idle, the drive's temperature hovered around 41 ºC. When pushed hard, the drive reached temperatures as high as 66 ºC when reading and 74 ºC when writing.
Surprisingly, these temperatures had no impact on the Gold P31's performance. No matter how hard I pushed it, the drive did not throttle its read or write speeds in any noticeable way.
Final Thoughts:
The SK hynix is an excellent choice for the gamer, designer or content creators looking for a fast, yet affordable, PCIe SSD for their notebook or desktop computer. This compact, M.2 form factor drive is powered by SK hynix's own "Cepheus" controller and is available with up to 1TB of their 128-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. Combine this with the company's HYPERWRITE technology and a PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe 1.3 interface and you have one of the fastest mainstream PCIe 3.0 SSDs on the market today. The 1TB version of the Gold P31 flew through our sequential transfer rate tests, reading at speeds as high as 3,565 MB/s and writing at more than 3,308 MB/s. The drive also did very well in our random write tests, producing more than 217,000 IOPS at low queue depths.
Aside from the fact that the Gold P31 does not support hardware based encryption, the only real issue I have is that I can't buy one in a 2TB capacity. Given, SK hynix did show off a 2TB version in the form of the Platinum P31 at CES 2020 but there has been no word as to when it will be available.
The Gold P31 is available now in 500GB and 1TB capacities and is offered exclusively through Amazon for $75 and $135, respectively.
Highs:
- Available in 500GB and 1TB capacities
- PCIe 3.0 x4 interface with NVMe protocol
- Equipped with 128-Layer 3D TLC NAND
- Excellent sequential and random read and write performance
- Good random read and write performance
- Small M.2 2280 form factor
- Large DRAM cache
- Reasonably priced
- 5 year warranty
Lows:
- Not available in higher capacities
- Does not support hardware based encryption
- Gets hot under heavy workloads
- Limited availability
