Solidigm, Intel's former SSD division acquired by SK Hynix, has introduced its first new family of solid-state drives for client PCs. The P41 Plus SSDs are essentially younger brethren of the company's Platinum P41 high-performance drives aimed at demanding users and gamers. But while peak performance of Solidigm's P41 Plus drives is lower when compared to higher-end models, they promise to offer consistently high performance, which implies a great user experience.
Solidigm's P41 Plus SSDs are based on the company's proprietary controller with a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface as well as the company's 3D NAND memory. The drives will be available in 512GB, 1TB, and 2GB configurations as well as in M.2-2280, M.2-2242, and M.2-2230 form-factors. The smaller drives (in M.2-2230 and M.2-2242 form-factors) will only be available to OEM customers, whereas the bigger drivers will be sold at retail as well.
As far as performance is concerned, Solidigm rates its P41 Plus for a sequential read speed of up to 4125 MB/s and sequential write speed of up to 3325 MB/s. Meanwhile, random read speed is claimed to be up to 390K IOPS, whereas random read speed is said to be up to 540K IOPS.
One of the key features of Solidigm's P41 Plus is the company's Synergy software that improves random read and write performance when the drive is getting filled up with data by monitoring usage patterns, identifying high-priority data, and moving frequently used data to the cache. Synergy is a purely software technology that must be downloaded and installed separately. Based on data from Solidigm, Synergy improves PCMark 10 performance by less than 10%, which may not be that significant, but at least it's there.
Solidigm has not announced pricing of its P41 Plus drives, but considering the fact that we are dealing with an entry-level PCIe 4.0 SSD family, we expect the products to be relatively inexpensive. We should learn more in the coming days.
