Model: SK hynix Gold P31 2TB PCIe M.2 Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: SK hynix
Provided By: SK hynix

As one of the biggest names in the semiconductor market, SK hynix doesn't need much of an introduction. Founded in 1983 as Hyundai Electronic Industrial Co., Ltd., the company quickly made its mark by producing Korea’s first 16Kb SRAM. Since then, SK hynix has continued to lead the industry with smaller, faster and lower power semiconductors. Today, they are the world's second-largest memory chipmaker as well as the third-largest semiconductor company. Their memory, NAND flash and CMOS image sensors are found in products from some of the biggest names in the computer industry including Apple, ASUS, Dell and HP.

With its background in NAND flash, it should come as no surprise that SK hynix is a major player in the SSD industry. In addition to supplying client and enterprise drives to PC OEMs, the company has begun a push into the U.S. retail market. Building on the success of its Gold S31 SATA SSD, SK hynix recently launched its first consumer-facing PCIe SSD, the Gold P31. Aimed at gamers, designers and content creators, this M.2 form factor drive is powered by SK hynix's own "Cepheus" controller and is available with up to 2TB of their 128-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. The Gold P31 also features the company's HYPERWRITE technology, which accelerates sequential write speeds, and is equipped with an ultra-fast PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe 1.3 interface.

The Gold P31 is available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. For this review, SK hynix sent us the 2TB version of the drive which is capable of delivering up to 3,500 MB/s sequential read and 3,200 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 570,000 random read and 600,000 random write IOPS.

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the Gold P31 has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at SK hynix's new PCIe SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the Gold P31 have what it takes? Can it deliver the value and performance we've come to expect from SK hynix? Keep reading as we find out.



 

The Gold P31 comes in a simple, yet attractive, black box with what appears to be a large, gold "nugget" on the front. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of information regarding the drive's specification or features. If you want detailed product information, you will need to visit SK hynix's website.

Like most manufacturers, SK hynix doesn't include a lot of extras with the Gold P31. Aside from the SSD, the only other things in the box were a couple of small, fold out guides containing warranty information as well as some brief installation instructions.

Physical Features:

The Gold P31 uses the 2280 form factor for M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. It measures 22 x 80 x 2.23 mm and tips the scales at 7g. The drive also has an "M key" edge connector which provides PCIe SSDs with up to 4x lanes of bandwidth.

The Gold P31 is the first drive to utilize SK hynix's "Cepheus" ACNT038 controller. Not much is known about this controller aside from that it has four channels and was designed and produced in house.

One of the few complaints people had about the 500GB and 1TB versions of the Gold P31 was that the PCB was green in color. This time around, SK hynix went with a stealthy black PCB.

For the 2TB version of the Gold P31, SK hynix has opted to use its own 128-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. If you'd remove the sticker, you'd see that there are two 1TB NAND flash packages on the top of the PCB.  The drive also has a single 2GB LPDDR4 DRAM chip that is used for caching.


The test system used in this review is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700x CPU, MSI B550 GAMING PLUS motherboard, 16GB (8GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix 3200 MHz DDR4 memory, Crucial P5 1TB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I used the latest version of Windows 10 Pro.

To test the performance of SK hynix's 2TB Gold P31 SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark. For comparison, I've also included test results from the Silicon Power UD70, Crucial P2, SK hynix Gold P31, Crucial P5, ADATA SWORDFISH, ADATA FALCON, Lexar NM610, Silicon Power P34A60, Patriot P300, Plextor M9PG Plus, Plextor M9PY Plus, ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro, Western Digital WD_BLACK SN750, Samsung 970 EVO Plus, ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, Crucial P1, ADATA XPG SX8200, Western Digital WD_BLACK NVMe, Samsung 970 EVO, Samsung 970 PRO, Plextor M9Pe, Plextor M8Se, Patriot Hellfire, ADATA XPG SX8000, Samsung 960 PRO, Toshiba OCZ RD400, Samsung 950 PRO, Samsung 870 EVO, Samsung 870 QVO, Silicon Power PC60, SK hynix Gold S31, ADATA Ultimate SU750, Samsung 860 QVO, Samsung 860 PRO and Crucial MX500.

As I mentioned earlier, the Gold P31 uses SK hynix's ACNT038 controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.

CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0:

First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential and random read and write speeds. For this test, we're using the peak and real world profiles.

According to SK hynix, the 2TB version of the Gold P31 is capable of reading at 3,500 MB/s and writing at 3,200 MB/s. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the drive had no problems reaching these speeds in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write tests.

As you'd expect, the Gold P31 wasn't nearly as fast when tested with the "real world" profile which uses a single thread and a much lower queue depth.  Nevertheless, it was still able to read at 2,288 MB/s and write at more than 3,212 MB/s.

HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:

Next, I used HD Tach to test the Gold P31's read, write and burst speeds as well as its random access time and CPU usage.

Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the Gold P31 had average read and write speeds of 1,718.7 MB/s and 1356.9 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 2117.5 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that, like most other TLC-based SSDs, the Gold P31 uses some sort of SLC caching. The drive starts writing at about 1,850 MB/s and then drops to about 1,300 MB/s when the write operation exceeds the size of the cache.

ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01:

I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the Gold P31's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 512B to 64 MB and the total length set to 256MB.


SK hynix Gold P31 2TB
 
Samsung 980 1TB

When tested with ATTO, the Gold P31's read speeds topped out at about 3.36 GB/s and its write speeds at 3.27 GB/s.


AS SSD:

AS SSD is a benchmark designed specifically for solid state drives. The application contains five synthetic tests used to determine the sequential and random read and write performance of a drive.


SK hynix Gold P31 2TB
 
Samsung 980 1TB

AS SSD also includes a copy benchmark. This test copies an ISO (two large files), program (many small files) and game (small and large files), returning the speed and duration of each.


SK hynix Gold P31 2TB
 
Samsung 980 1TB

HD Tune Pro 5.75:

Next, I ran a series of tests using HD Tune Pro. This hard disk utility measures a drive's performance by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its access time, burst rate and CPU usage. For this review, I'm also going to use it to benchmark the Gold P31's random read and write speeds, random access times and the number of operations per second.


SK hynix Gold P31 2TB - Read Benchmark
 
Samsung 980 1TB - Read Benchmark


SK hynix Gold P31 2TB - Write Benchmark
 
Samsung 980 1TB - Write Benchmark

The Gold P31 performed relatively well when benchmarked with HD Tune. The drive had average read and write speeds of 2831.0 MB/s and 1829.7 MB/s, respectively.


SK hynix Gold P31 2TB - Random Access Read
 
Samsung 980 1TB - Random Access Read


SK hynix Gold P31 2TB - Random Access Write
 
Samsung 980 1TB - Random Access Write

When writing 4KB blocks, the Gold P31 reached 43,869 IOPS and had an average speed of 171.364 MB/s. The drive was even faster when reading, reaching 49,706 IOPS with an average speed of 194.167 MB/s.


Anvil's Storage Utilities:

Anvil's Storage Utilities is another benchmark designed with SSDs in mind. The standard storage benchmark measures a drive's performance by testing its transfer speeds, access times and IOPS.

Iometer:

Lastly, I ran a series of tests using Iometer. This tool can be configured to benchmark a number of things. In this case, I used it to measure the 980's read and write speeds and the number of operations per second. The tests were run using random bytes and a queue depth of 3.

The Gold P31's performance here was similar to what we saw in our other tests. The drive was able to read at 3385.87 MB/s and write at 3341.16 MB/s.

The 2TB Gold P31 didn't perform as well as the 1TB version when doing random reads and writes. Nevertheless, the drive was able to read at 291.13 MB/s and write at 556.51 MB/s.

According to SK hynix, the 2TB Gold P31 is capable of 570,000 IOPS when reading and 600,000 IOPS when writing 4K blocks. In our tests, the drive reached 74,528 random read IOPS and 142,440 random write IOPS. As with most drives, the Gold P31 performed better at higher queue depths. With sixteen threads and the queue depth set to 32, it reached 517.405 random read IOPS and 665,034 random write IOPS.


PCMark 8 - Storage Test:

PCMark 8 is a complete benchmark for Windows. It includes five benchmark tests, each designed around a specific scenario. The storage benchmark measures drive performance using real-world traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games.

PCMark 8 also includes a consistency test which measures the performance consistency and degradation tendency of a storage system. The test reports the performance level at the start, the degraded steady-state and the recovered state as well as the number of iterations required to reach the degraded state and the recovered state. For this test, we are focusing on the Adobe Photoshop (Heavy) trace and will look at both the bandwidth and latency of the drive

The 2TB Gold P31 did quite well throughout PCMark's consistency test. While not nearly as fast as the Crucial P5, it performed better than the drives from Samsung and Silicon Power during the degradation and steady state phases. The Gold P31's performance also increased during the recovery phase, topping out at about 1,108 MB/s.

PCMark 10 - Full System Drive Benchmark:

PCMark 10's Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. This benchmark produces an overall score as a measure of drive performance. Comparing devices is as simple as comparing scores. The tests also measure and report the bandwidth and average access time performance for the drive.

Thanks to its high bandwidth and low latency, the 2TB Gold P31 did quite well in PCMark 10's Full System Drive Benchmark. Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to top the Plextor M9PG Plus, Samsung 980 or the 1TB version of the Gold P31.


TRIM Performance:

While SSD's offer many benefits, there are some downsides to using flash memory. One of the biggest issues people run into is performance degradation. Over time, an SSD will run out of fresh blocks and will have to write over data the file system has marked as deleted. This procedure is very complicated and can slow an SSD's write speeds considerably.

To fix this problem, most manufacturers have added TRIM support to their SSDs. The TRIM command allows an operating system, such as Windows 10, to tell an SSD which data blocks are no longer in use. Using this information, the drive pro-actively erases these blocks and adds them to the free block pool.

To test the Gold P31's TRIM and garbage collection functions, I first put the drive in a "dirty" state. I used Iometer to fill 80% of the drive and then ran a random write test for 30 minutes. This had little impact on the  Gold P31's read speed. However, its average writing speed dropped to 364.34 MB/s.


SK hynix Gold P31 - Dirty

To see how well the Gold P31 could recover, I let the computer sit for about 30 minutes and then reran the test. The drive's average read speed climbed up to 3115.25 MB/s. However, its write speed lagged behind, averaging out at only 598.90 MB/s.


SK hynix Gold P31 - After TRIM

Lastly, I used Parted Magic to perform a secure erase on the Gold P31. With the drive wiped clean, it had average read and write speeds of 2957.10 MB/s and 3051.78 MB/s, respectively.

 
SK hynix Gold P31 - Secure Erased

Final Thoughts:

The 2TB version of SK hynix's Gold P31 SSD is finally here and, like the other drives in the series, it's an excellent choice for the gamer, designer or content creator looking to boost the performance and storage capacity of their computer. This compact, M.2 form factor drive is powered by SK hynix's own "Cepheus" controller and is available with up to 2TB 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 a drive that delivers performance, reliability and storage capacity at a reasonable price. The 2TB version of the Gold P31 flew through our sequential transfer rate tests, reading at speeds as high as 3,603 MB/s and writing at more than 3,400 MB/s. The drive also did fairly well in our random write tests, producing more than 142,000 IOPS at low queue depths.

The Gold P31 is available now in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities and is offered exclusively through Amazon. Prices currently range from $70 up to $245 for the 2TB version reviewed here.

Highs:

  • Available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities
  • PCIe 3.0 x4 interface with NVMe protocol
  • Equipped with 128-Layer 3D TLC NAND
  • Excellent sequential 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:

  • Does not support hardware based encryption
  • Can get hot under heavy workloads
  • Limited availability