Solidigm P44 Pro SSD Review: Platinum P41, Take Two (Updated)

Comparison Products

The 1TB Solidigm P44 Pro is up against some very fast drives, such as the WD Black SN850X, the Kingston Fury Renegade, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, the Samsung 980 Pro, the SK hynix Platinum P41, and the Crucial P5 Plus. Also tested is the Solidigm P41 Plus to give some idea on what you’re getting in a higher-end product.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. 

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The P44 Pro is the fastest drive we’ve ever tested in 3DMark at 1TB, as well.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

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The P44 Pro dominates in PCMark 10, too. This speaks well of SK hynix’s excellent new flash and its ability to optimize its controllers.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

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The P44 Pro is first in DiskBench, too, being the fastest 1TB SSD we’ve tested.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

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There are no issues with the P44 Pro’s ATTO performance. It’s not the best but the CDM sequential results show the drive can hold its own, with only a dip for QD1 writes. Random 4K QD1 latency is good but not the very best. The P41 Plus sibling struggles a bit more at 1TB with sequential performance due to dense QLC, but this is not an issue with 4KB performance.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  

Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

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The 1TB P44 Pro manages almost 6.5 GBps in pSLC mode before falling to below 1.6 GBps afterwards. Both modes are a bit slower than they are with the 2TB model, but still very fast. The cache is a bit smaller on the 1TB capacity, but larger in relative terms at nearly 215GB. This underlines the fact that this hardware holds up better at 1TB than the competition. We have not yet benchmarked a 1TB 990 Pro, but as of now, the P44 Pro is the best drive on the market at this capacity in terms of overall performance.

Cache recovery is the same as with the 2TB model and the Platinum P41: fast for static, slow for dynamic. This is typical and is a good way to balance endurance and performance.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

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The 1TB P44 Pro is extremely efficient, matching the class-leading Platinum P41, though it doesn’t quite see the edge that the 2TB model does. SK hynix and Solidigm have done an excellent job in optimizing this drive at all capacities. The P41 Plus, on the other hand, could use some work. However, that drive is using flash that originated with Intel and the controller is not proprietary, so we expect better things in the future for its lower-end options.

The 1TB model closely matched the 2TB in temperature testing. TLC writes are a bit faster at 2TB, 1.65 GBps versus the 1.5 GBps here, but both models throttled down to about 925 MBps after hitting 82C. A heatsink is again recommended.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSD.

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