SK hynix Gold P31 Overview
Taking a first look at the drive we can see it is your typical M.2 2280 (80mm) drive which is made to be installed on motherboards and in laptops. The first thing that really caught my attention was the green PCB. This will definitely clash with your motherboard if you don’t plan on using a heatsink on the drive. On the top of the drive you have a simple sticker.
Flipping over to the back we can see that the drive is single-sided, which makes it great for thinner laptops. The only thing on the back is a smaller sticker with all of your relevant information.
Carefully peeling the top sticker off we can get a look at the components. At the heart of the drive is SK hynix’s own “Cepheus” PCI-Express 3.0 x 4 NVMe controller. This is only a 4-channel controller, which is interesting as most NVMe solid state drives in this segment use 8-channel controllers, but this drive with its 4-channel controller is made to compete with them. The reason for this of course their own 128-layer TLC NAND flash you’ll find on the drive. Finally you have a LPDDR4 chip, which is 1GB for the 1TB version of the drive.
