**Data SSD Review: A Data Storage Solution Worth Considering**

In our review of the Hynix Gold P31, we found that this data storage solution performed consistently well in various benchmarks, including PC Mark 10. This was expected, given its specifications and features. The drive's performance in these tests is a good indication of its ability to handle demanding tasks and provide a smooth user experience.

**Power Usage: A Key Consideration**

One area where the Hynix Gold P31 impressed us was in its power usage. When we put it through various tests, including those conducted on an ASRock Aqua system with a high-powered NVIDIA GPU, we found that the drive's power consumption was significantly lower than expected. In fact, our tests revealed that the drive could achieve temperatures as low as 71-72 degrees Celsius, which is unusually cool for a PCIe 4 SSD. This level of power efficiency is particularly noteworthy when considering laptop battery life.

**Laptop Battery Life: A Surprising Advantage**

We also had the opportunity to test the Hynix Gold P31 in a laptop setup, and the results were impressive. When we used the drive in our laptop, which normally achieves around 10 hours of battery life, we found that it was possible to extend that battery life by an additional 30-45 minutes when running heavy disk-intensive tasks with the screen brightness turned down. This level of power savings is a significant advantage, especially for users who need their laptops to last throughout the day.

**A Sophisticated Controller**

One aspect of the Hynix Gold P31's performance that stood out was its controller. When we ran benchmarks such as FIO and iometer, we found that the drive was consistently fast, even with highly compressible files. However, what impressed us most was the level of sophistication in the controller's behavior. Even after implementing wear leveling, the drive maintained latency levels of around 60 microseconds, which is unusually low for a PCIe 4 SSD.

**A Genuinely Innovative Product**

What sets the Hynix Gold P31 apart from other data storage solutions on the market is its commitment to innovation and performance. As an OEM-designed product, the drive benefits from the expertise of Sk Hynix's engineers, who have developed a truly sophisticated controller that optimizes for speed and efficiency. This is not just a first-generation product; it's a genuine attempt to push the boundaries of what's possible with flash memory.

**The Verdict: A Recommendation for Laptops**

Based on our testing, we would highly recommend the Hynix Gold P31 for laptop use. While its performance may not be the best in every test, its power savings and reliability make it an attractive option for users who need a drive that can keep up with their demands. However, for desktop use, there are likely better options available at a lower price point.

**The Verdict: A Recommendation for Desktop Use**

For desktop use, we would not recommend the Hynix Gold P31 at this time. While it's a great product in many ways, its performance may not be competitive with other drives on the market, and its price may be too high for some users. However, as prices continue to drop and more OEMs begin to adopt this technology, we can expect to see the Hynix Gold P31 become an increasingly viable option for desktop users.

**A Final Note**

In conclusion, our testing of the Hynix Gold P31 has shown that it's a genuinely innovative product that offers excellent performance and power savings. While there may be some drawbacks to its use in certain scenarios, we believe that it's worth considering for laptop users who need a reliable and efficient storage solution. As with any technology, it's essential to weigh the pros and cons and consider your specific needs before making a purchase decision.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday's march 192nd of the year 2020. and it finally came the sk honyx gold p31 ssd there's a little bit of a kerfuffle uh sk hynix was going to send one of these but to review you know like a review sample they did not i got this one from amazon you learn more about that my previous video but basically it was how much money do you want zero obviously and definitely don't compare to corsair and a data so i like the packaging biodegradable packaging that's a lot better than samsung samsung uses you know this plastic is going to be here for a hundred thousand years some archaeology somewhere is going to be excavating and they're going to be like this computer you know the the the ssd packaging evaporated but this other computer is fine it's paper basically oh it's even biodegradable packaging like the plastic this is probably that plastic that breaks down oh yeah yeah this is the uh the plant material that uh breaks down in water i was peeling the sticker for a second there because a lot of the time the sticker could also be a heatsink yeah you can pay extra and have a copper foil embedded in your sticker and that actually works well as a little bit of a heatsink for these things that wasn't the case though at least it doesn't feel like that's the case quickly robin to the aqua this is the computer that we're using for a lot of our testing it's the asrock aqua it's got a z490 chipset it's water cooled it's overclocked 5.3 gigahertz it's 10 900 k processor this thing is crazy fast for a standard test suite we're using things like pc mark which is uh pretty good for doing you know desktop and productivity testing we also use crystal disk mark for doing performance testing there the really exciting thing about this ssd is that it's its own controller so sk hynix has created their own controller which is different in the market sk and honest also has a lot of oem customers so like when you buy a laptop it will probably come with an sk hynix ssd or there's a good chance it could come with an sk onyx ssd because sk onyx is a huge manufacturer but this is 144 layers it's quad level cells so you know four bits per cell and the microcontroller here has some really interesting innovations on paper but it's somewhat unusual for sk heights to be marketing these in their retail space i think they're a little bit worried about that in terms of the performance and how things stack up in the market and that kind of thing all right so we've got our gold p31 ssd and the results are in we've done grueling wear level testing i've written to this drive 250 times over a little more than that actually so the deal with this 144 level 144 layer flash sell stuff is that it should enable sk honest to have a better price point or a better profit margin than other people in the flash industry because they're sort of first to do that they also have their own in-house controller so again better margins for sk hynix if we do the pc mark test like if i show you the pc mark tests here and we do the test at the beginning and then we do the test like when it's a brand new fresh drive and we do the test again after the drive starting to wear the performance characteristics are not necessarily the same same with as the drive fills when you fill up the drive the performance goes down well you know it's especially true unlike the corsair mp600 gen 4 pcie ssd this was the one terabyte model as it fills up it uses the free space kind of as a single level cell cache because at single when you operate flash memory and single level cells in single level mode it will hold one fourth of the information but it's a lot faster and so as the drive fills up you have less and less space to use as buffer so i filled this drive up about 250 times and did the drive performance consistency test this score from pc mark it's not a good score it's not a great score it's not a terrible score it's it's okay it's not not great it's not terrible it's a it's actually a little worse than the mp600 unless your mp600 has a lot of wear on it and it's quite a bit worse than say the adata um sx8200 this is actually the the gammaxx s10 this is an older one just pretend this is sx8200 i've only got one of those and it's in another system and i don't want to get it but the adata ssd had a pretty good showing for performance consistency in the pc mark 10 benchmark and that's about what i expected now in terms of power usage there's a full review at anandtech you should check that out because they did a way more in-depth tests than i did i think they were in the same boat that i am and so you know i can confirm that their test is basically consistent with my test in terms of all of the stuff that i did i couldn't measure power usage directly but another indicator of power usage is how hot the darn thing gets and so i use the flear and i monitored as i was running this thing for 10 15 20 hours i did all this testing on the asrock aqua which is a really high nz 490 system because could look that's fast and running through the benchmarks and running through the heat i saw a peak of about 71 72 degrees c and it's very clearly on the controller part not the flash memory part but that's kind of shockingly low i mean our pci express 4 ssd here has to have this giant heatsink which is literally bigger than the drive itself even the s the adata sx8200 which is not pci express 4 runs quite a bit hotter so in terms of power usage laptop battery life i did throw it in a laptop and i did do some informal testing and for a laptop that normally gets about 10 hours of battery life i could get an extra 30 45 minutes as long as i was doing this heavy disc intense stuff with the screen brightness turned all the way down so it does seem and that's versus a samsung 960 pro so seems like the power usage is quite a bit lower confirmed just turning between heat production and laptop battery life so yes i would actually recommend the hynex gold p31 for laptop use the performance isn't the best the endurance is isn't the best but it is fast enough and it has enough endurance i don't think it's going to be an unreliable product and the fact that you have power savings really is incredible but you know if you want a second opinion also check out the annantec article they came to pretty much the same conclusion they got theirs out a little faster than i did you know don't hold that against me i had to jump through some hoops but overall it's a really impressive showing from sk honeys now there is something weird going on in some of the benchmarks because if i use a test like fio and i have zero filled files uh you know it runs and performs about like you'd expect but if i use a highly compressible file that's not filled with zeros it's faster so i think the controller must be doing some type of compression or some type of creative interpretation of what you're doing because even after doing wear leveling um the the latency was still a pretty consistent 60 microseconds so the controller on this drive is very sophisticated it is compared to other controllers in the market and what they're doing and so while it's not the fastest controller in the market i think that it's trying to optimize for speed and efficiency and you know to sort of take all the boxes sk hynex is used and sold by oem so don't think of it as a first generation product this is really them taking all the special sauce that they've done working for oems big laptop makers bundling it with laptops and sort of pouring that into a commercial product and saying here our engineers are doing something nobody else is doing in the market what do you think of the product and it is actually a genuinely very interesting product and what they're doing with the controller i like that i like seeing that innovation i've always you know i've been saying for the past few months i think flash memory is right for innovation because most of the controllers and most of the stuff out there is rock dumb stupid and if we want better speed and better latency and better reliability we're going to have to mix storage mediums we're going to have to mix algorithmic strategies and sk honest their engineers they know what they're doing this is this is a genuinely good product so i'm not sure why there was shenanigans in the other you know that's covered in another video but overall it is actually a good product i would recommend it for laptops desktop use is probably also okay but it's going to come down to that price performance there are better drives at a better price in the market so you know it's just going to come down to price in your market where you are what you want is it worth paying the premium for a laptop i think so is it worth paying the premium for desktop no i don't think so so it just depends on what you want to use it for i'm little this is level one i'm signing up i'll see you latertoday's march 192nd of the year 2020. and it finally came the sk honyx gold p31 ssd there's a little bit of a kerfuffle uh sk hynix was going to send one of these but to review you know like a review sample they did not i got this one from amazon you learn more about that my previous video but basically it was how much money do you want zero obviously and definitely don't compare to corsair and a data so i like the packaging biodegradable packaging that's a lot better than samsung samsung uses you know this plastic is going to be here for a hundred thousand years some archaeology somewhere is going to be excavating and they're going to be like this computer you know the the the ssd packaging evaporated but this other computer is fine it's paper basically oh it's even biodegradable packaging like the plastic this is probably that plastic that breaks down oh yeah yeah this is the uh the plant material that uh breaks down in water i was peeling the sticker for a second there because a lot of the time the sticker could also be a heatsink yeah you can pay extra and have a copper foil embedded in your sticker and that actually works well as a little bit of a heatsink for these things that wasn't the case though at least it doesn't feel like that's the case quickly robin to the aqua this is the computer that we're using for a lot of our testing it's the asrock aqua it's got a z490 chipset it's water cooled it's overclocked 5.3 gigahertz it's 10 900 k processor this thing is crazy fast for a standard test suite we're using things like pc mark which is uh pretty good for doing you know desktop and productivity testing we also use crystal disk mark for doing performance testing there the really exciting thing about this ssd is that it's its own controller so sk hynix has created their own controller which is different in the market sk and honest also has a lot of oem customers so like when you buy a laptop it will probably come with an sk hynix ssd or there's a good chance it could come with an sk onyx ssd because sk onyx is a huge manufacturer but this is 144 layers it's quad level cells so you know four bits per cell and the microcontroller here has some really interesting innovations on paper but it's somewhat unusual for sk heights to be marketing these in their retail space i think they're a little bit worried about that in terms of the performance and how things stack up in the market and that kind of thing all right so we've got our gold p31 ssd and the results are in we've done grueling wear level testing i've written to this drive 250 times over a little more than that actually so the deal with this 144 level 144 layer flash sell stuff is that it should enable sk honest to have a better price point or a better profit margin than other people in the flash industry because they're sort of first to do that they also have their own in-house controller so again better margins for sk hynix if we do the pc mark test like if i show you the pc mark tests here and we do the test at the beginning and then we do the test like when it's a brand new fresh drive and we do the test again after the drive starting to wear the performance characteristics are not necessarily the same same with as the drive fills when you fill up the drive the performance goes down well you know it's especially true unlike the corsair mp600 gen 4 pcie ssd this was the one terabyte model as it fills up it uses the free space kind of as a single level cell cache because at single when you operate flash memory and single level cells in single level mode it will hold one fourth of the information but it's a lot faster and so as the drive fills up you have less and less space to use as buffer so i filled this drive up about 250 times and did the drive performance consistency test this score from pc mark it's not a good score it's not a great score it's not a terrible score it's it's okay it's not not great it's not terrible it's a it's actually a little worse than the mp600 unless your mp600 has a lot of wear on it and it's quite a bit worse than say the adata um sx8200 this is actually the the gammaxx s10 this is an older one just pretend this is sx8200 i've only got one of those and it's in another system and i don't want to get it but the adata ssd had a pretty good showing for performance consistency in the pc mark 10 benchmark and that's about what i expected now in terms of power usage there's a full review at anandtech you should check that out because they did a way more in-depth tests than i did i think they were in the same boat that i am and so you know i can confirm that their test is basically consistent with my test in terms of all of the stuff that i did i couldn't measure power usage directly but another indicator of power usage is how hot the darn thing gets and so i use the flear and i monitored as i was running this thing for 10 15 20 hours i did all this testing on the asrock aqua which is a really high nz 490 system because could look that's fast and running through the benchmarks and running through the heat i saw a peak of about 71 72 degrees c and it's very clearly on the controller part not the flash memory part but that's kind of shockingly low i mean our pci express 4 ssd here has to have this giant heatsink which is literally bigger than the drive itself even the s the adata sx8200 which is not pci express 4 runs quite a bit hotter so in terms of power usage laptop battery life i did throw it in a laptop and i did do some informal testing and for a laptop that normally gets about 10 hours of battery life i could get an extra 30 45 minutes as long as i was doing this heavy disc intense stuff with the screen brightness turned all the way down so it does seem and that's versus a samsung 960 pro so seems like the power usage is quite a bit lower confirmed just turning between heat production and laptop battery life so yes i would actually recommend the hynex gold p31 for laptop use the performance isn't the best the endurance is isn't the best but it is fast enough and it has enough endurance i don't think it's going to be an unreliable product and the fact that you have power savings really is incredible but you know if you want a second opinion also check out the annantec article they came to pretty much the same conclusion they got theirs out a little faster than i did you know don't hold that against me i had to jump through some hoops but overall it's a really impressive showing from sk honeys now there is something weird going on in some of the benchmarks because if i use a test like fio and i have zero filled files uh you know it runs and performs about like you'd expect but if i use a highly compressible file that's not filled with zeros it's faster so i think the controller must be doing some type of compression or some type of creative interpretation of what you're doing because even after doing wear leveling um the the latency was still a pretty consistent 60 microseconds so the controller on this drive is very sophisticated it is compared to other controllers in the market and what they're doing and so while it's not the fastest controller in the market i think that it's trying to optimize for speed and efficiency and you know to sort of take all the boxes sk hynex is used and sold by oem so don't think of it as a first generation product this is really them taking all the special sauce that they've done working for oems big laptop makers bundling it with laptops and sort of pouring that into a commercial product and saying here our engineers are doing something nobody else is doing in the market what do you think of the product and it is actually a genuinely very interesting product and what they're doing with the controller i like that i like seeing that innovation i've always you know i've been saying for the past few months i think flash memory is right for innovation because most of the controllers and most of the stuff out there is rock dumb stupid and if we want better speed and better latency and better reliability we're going to have to mix storage mediums we're going to have to mix algorithmic strategies and sk honest their engineers they know what they're doing this is this is a genuinely good product so i'm not sure why there was shenanigans in the other you know that's covered in another video but overall it is actually a good product i would recommend it for laptops desktop use is probably also okay but it's going to come down to that price performance there are better drives at a better price in the market so you know it's just going to come down to price in your market where you are what you want is it worth paying the premium for a laptop i think so is it worth paying the premium for desktop no i don't think so so it just depends on what you want to use it for i'm little this is level one i'm signing up i'll see you later\n"