SK Hynix Gold P31 1TB NVMe SSD Review

7

SPECworkstation 3.0.2 Storage Benchmark

SPECworstation benchmark is an excellent benchmark to test systems using workstation type workloads. In this test, we only ran the Storage component, which is 15 separate tests.

SK hynix Gold P31 1TB SPECws
SK Hynix Gold P31 1TB SPECws
SK hynix Gold P31 1TB SPECws Chart
SK Hynix Gold P31 1TB SPECws Chart

The Gold P31 1TB is vying for the top spot in SPECworkstation, only narrowly losing to the Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 1TB. Considering that drive has twice the available PCIe bandwidth, this is an impressive result from the Gold P31.

Temperatures

We monitored the idle and maximum temperature during testing with HWMonitor to get some idea of the thermal performance and requirements of the drive. Please keep in mind that our test bench is an open frame chassis in a 22C room, and is thus not representative of a cramped low-airflow case.

SK hynix Gold P31 1TB Temps
SK Hynix Gold P31 1TB Temps

The electrical efficiency of the Gold P31 1TB drive really shows in the temperature department, where the drive topped out at only 57C in the hardest part of our testing. This drive is within a few degrees of SATA SSD temperatures, and that is very impressive.

Final Words

The SK Hynix Gold P31 1TB is priced as a mainstream PCIe 3.0 SSD that retails for around $135. That does not make it the least expensive 1TB NVMe SSD on the market by any stretch, but it manages to chalk up performance wins over essentially every less expensive drive on the market, so an argument can be made for money well spent. The $135 price point does, however, maintain a healthy discount compared to the least expensive PCIe 4.0 1TB drives, which leads me to conclude it is priced very fairly.

Compared to other PCIe 3.0 1TB SSDs we have reviewed and will review in the near future, the SK Hynix drive is very impressive. It offers class-leading performance, efficiency, and thermals. Comparing to PCIe 4.0 drives, the performance is still good though still gated by the limits of the 3.0 interface.

SK hynix Gold P31 1TB Front
SK hynix Gold P31 1TB Front

With many platforms in the market still using PCIe Gen3, there is still plenty of room in the market for high-performance consumer PCIe 3.0 NVMe drives. The SK Hynix Gold P31 1TB drive sits at the top of that crowd. If PCIe 4.0 connectivity is not an option for you, for technical or cost reasons, then the Gold P31 is a great price/ performance offering and gets a full recommendation from me.

7 COMMENTS

  1. I’ve been waiting for this drive to be released. 🙂

    A quick request for SSD/NVMe drive articles, could the presence or absence of power loss protection be mentioned? Maybe in a little feature matrix? PLP, DRAM cache size, SLC cache size, IOPs, TBW, etc.

    I’m assuming as a consumer drive this doesn’t have PLP, but explicitly calling it out is nice.

  2. RQ,
    Normally I put that in there – the absence (or presence) of PLP. I must have accidentally cut that from my article at some point and failed to notice. Apologies!

  3. My impression with flash media is that individual units of the same make perform differently depending on usage history and possibly manufacturing variations. Is there any chance in testing three to seven individual units from the same manufacturer of the same model but different production runs to see how much variation there is?

  4. It would be great if a more current/larger Samsung SDD could be reviewed in the near future. It’s quite difficult to compare the performance of a 250 GB drive to other higher capacity drives.

  5. Did you have a heatsink on the drive when testing temperatures? I get similar temps in my laptop with heatsinks attached.

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