Final Thoughts
The Gold P31 is actually SK hynix’s first consumer solid state drive in the U.S. market. That is not to say that haven’t been making solid state drives for a very long time, which they have. It is great to see them come out with a consumer drive though, their ability to control everything on the drive really benefits the end user. As I mentioned earlier in this review SK hynix makes the controller, NAND, cache chip, and firmware on this drive. So they have absolute control and can get the most out of the drive.
That is very apparent in our test results. The Gold P31 was in the top position of all of the Gen3 M.2 drives we’ve tested! That means it definitely lives up to its advertised speeds of 3500 MB/s read and 3200 MB/s write. We also saw very good sustained write performance thanks to SK hynix’s HYPERWRITE technology. Most drives we test start seeing performance degradation after 10-20% of the drive is written to, but with the Gold P31 we only saw this after 60% of the drive was written to and even after that the performance was not all that bad.
With SK hynix using their own controller they also do not need to include a heatsink for it. During our testing the drive did not over-heat or throttle at all, which was great to see. I do have to say that I am not a big fan of the green PCB, but for most people you will be covering this with an M.2 heatsink that is included with your motherboard.
Right now SK hynix is selling the 1TB version of the Gold P31 for $134.99, which we feel is a very fair price especially considering SK hynix backs the drive up with a 5-year warranty. Overall ThinkComputers gives the SK hynix Gold P31 M.2 NVMe Solid State Drive a 10 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– Great performance
– Everything on the drive made by SK Hynix
– 4-channel controller competes with 8-channel controllers
– HYPERWRITE technology
– 5-year warranty
– Does not over-heat and a does not require a heatsink
Cons:
– None that I could find
