Samsung 990 Pro 2TB vs SK Hynix P41 2TB

[Jops]

I'm thinking of buying a new SSD because my old Samsung 970 Evo Plus no longer has sufficient storage space for my needs.I'm trying to decide between Samsung 990 Pro and SK Hynix P41, but I'm not sure which one is better. Can you please help me with the choice? Which one is better?

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Get the Samsung.

 

[Jops]

Get the Samsung.

Why? Are there any objective reasons to choose it over sk hynix?

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Why? Are there any objective reasons to choose it over sk hynix?

A Few.

1. Its faster.
2. It has a better/more efficient controller resulting in better performance and lower power draw.
3. Samsung is newer

 

[Jops]

A Few.

1. Its faster.
2. It has a better/more efficient controller resulting in better performance and lower power draw.
3. Samsung is newer

But its SLC cache is much smaller.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

But its SLC cache is much smaller.

Only matters if youre writing huge amounts of data enough to use up all of the cache.

 

[Jops]

Only matters if youre writing huge amounts of data enough to use up all of the cache.

That's also true. But I'm not entirely sure if $20 more expensiove samsung will be noticeably better in my use case, and that difference in speed is almost negligible. Power consu,ption is totally negligible as I won't ever use it in a laptop or anything like that, and my rig consumes ~700 watts, so those 5-10W won't matter.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

That's also true. But I'm not entirely sure if $20 more expensiove samsung will be noticeably better in my use case, and that difference in speed is almost negligible. Power consu,ption is totally negligible as I won't ever use it in a laptop or anything like that, and my rig consumes ~700 watts, so those 5-10W won't matter.

Sounds like your mind was already made up and you just wanted confirmation

 

[bonehead123]

Well, with over $10K worth of them currently in service in various sizes & configs, some old, some new, both at home & in client rigs, I can HIGHLY recommend the WD 850x Blacks....

They are just as fast as Sammy's (sometimes faster), have a great utility for updates and management, AND there is NO "Sammy tax" to pay just for the privilege of having a high-performance drive....

I'm not saying that Sammy's are not good drives, they are, but for what they charge for them, I've never seen the "bang for buck" equation working in their favor

SK's OTOH, well, I've had some bad experiences with them in the past 2 years, so they are on my "no-buy list" for the foreseeable future....

 

[Selaya]

the p41 will should be more power efficient than any extant samsung device. (p31 might be more power-efficient than the p41, but it doesnt seem like w1zz tests for power efficiency directly. however it was capable of running all thermal tests w/o throttling, so power consumption should be within reason.)

here is a power-efficiency comparison for the p31: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16012/the-sk-hynix-gold-p31-ssd-review/7
tl;dr: it's blowing everything else out of the water, it's not even close
(i suspect the p41 being its successor performing similarly, but if power efficiency is what you're caring about, less features as in pcie generations is probably better actually)

 

[Jops]

Well, with over $10K worth of them currently in service in various sizes & configs, some old, some new, both at home & in client rigs, I can HIGHLY recommend the WD 850x Blacks....

They are just as fast as Sammy's (sometimes faster), have a great utility for updates and management, AND there is NO "Sammy tax" to pay just for the privilege of having a high-performance drive....

I'm not saying that Sammy's are not good drives, they are, but for what they charge for them, I've never seen the "bang for buck" equation working in their favor

SK's OTOH, well, I've had some bad experiences with them in the past 2 years, so they are on my "no-buy list" for the foreseeable future....

Thanks for the recommendation.

 

[Kiriya]

Thanks for the recommendation.

If you want quality and stability. Samsung 990 pro only...

 

[_roman_]

SAMSUNG / Western Digital = WD = Sandisk - issues with mainboards and firmware in the past.

I recommend something with dedicated DRAM, like the first batches of the KC3000.

 

[Sol_Badguy]

@Jops

Depending on your country/region the usual suspects are a good starting point:
WD SN850X, Crucial T500, Kingston KC3000 / Fury Renegade, SK Hynix P41, Samsung 990 Pro.
If they're all available then it's a matter of price, whatever's cheaper is preferable as it's going to do the job pretty much the same, test differences will appear much greater than what you observe in practice.

But of course it's reasonable to expect the Samsung 990 Pro to be the most expensive, it is definitely fast but it doesn't take the first position in all tests (for Gen4 I mean).
Anyway apart from the 990 Pro the others should be in the same ballpark price-wise, look at more reviews that include all or most of them and see if there are some which appear more consistent/balanced in tests, I prefer ones that don't exhibit very large performance differences from one test to another.

There is no perfect drive therefore there can't be an unanimously agreed upon answer, everything is a compromise, but from the offer that's available you have several choices that are pretty close to each other so much so that you can't tell which drive you're using, aside from running benchmarks.

 

[Red Hood]

Both those SSDs are very good, they can run pretty hot so a heatsink is recommended (the 990 pro is available with a heatsink from Samsung or you can buy a third party heatsink if it works out cheaper)

 

[Knight47]

SAMSUNG / Western Digital = WD = Sandisk - issues with mainboards and firmware in the past.

I recommend something with dedicated DRAM, like the first batches of the KC3000.

P41 has FW issues too, they are still fixing it.

 

[TommyT]

Depending on your country/region, i have 850x 1tb and the 990 pro 1tb cost~35$ more... so look for the better price.

990pro, wd 850x, kc3000

all is the price

 

[Jops]

Depending on your country/region, i have 850x 1tb and the 990 pro 1tb cost~35$ more... so look for the better price.

990pro, wd 850x, kc3000

all is the price

@Jops

Depending on your country/region the usual suspects are a good starting point:
WD SN850X, Crucial T500, Kingston KC3000 / Fury Renegade, SK Hynix P41, Samsung 990 Pro.
If they're all available then it's a matter of price, whatever's cheaper is preferable as it's going to do the job pretty much the same, test differences will appear much greater than what you observe in practice.

But of course it's reasonable to expect the Samsung 990 Pro to be the most expensive, it is definitely fast but it doesn't take the first position in all tests (for Gen4 I mean).
Anyway apart from the 990 Pro the others should be in the same ballpark price-wise, look at more reviews that include all or most of them and see if there are some which appear more consistent/balanced in tests, I prefer ones that don't exhibit very large performance differences from one test to another.

There is no perfect drive therefore there can't be an unanimously agreed upon answer, everything is a compromise, but from the offer that's available you have several choices that are pretty close to each other so much so that you can't tell which drive you're using, aside from running benchmarks.

They're all the around the same price where I live, so I'll probably purchase samsung as I've had a good experience with their drives in the past.

Both those SSDs are very good, they can run pretty hot so a heatsink is recommended (the 990 pro is available with a heatsink from Samsung or you can buy a third party heatsink if it works out cheaper)

I'll no doubt use a heatsink, also even my gen.3 drive is hot enough to need one. But it was one of the hottest of all at its release, and now almost all SSDs require heatsinks...

SAMSUNG / Western Digital = WD = Sandisk - issues with mainboards and firmware in the past.

I recommend something with dedicated DRAM, like the first batches of the KC3000.

I'll look into that.

 

[Chrispy_]

If the Hynix is cheaper (or the WD 850X is cheaper) just get that.

Unless you're a really heavy user, any decent Gen4 SSD is going to be fast enough that other components in your system are the bottleneck for all but the most synthetic of tests. DRAMless drives like the SN7100 or Lexar NM790 are plenty fast enough, but I like to buy drives with DRAM so that I can use them at decent speeds in M.2 enclosures or as SSD caches for NAS boxes later in life. DRAMless drives are only good for Windows.

I avoid QLC like the plague, after that I look for something in the upper-third of the TPU overall performance charts that's on sale right now. The Solidigm P44 Pro 2 TB seems to be the same controller and NAND as the P41, use that as a surrogate in the charts.

I don't think you have to worry about power consumption for any of the PCIe 4.0 drives, they're all reasonable enough that the basic M.2 heatsinks included with your motherboard are ample. If you are putting this into a secondary M.2 slot on your motherboard that doesn't have a heatsink, then either buy one that's known to not throttle as a bare drive, or just buy a $6 heatsink separately.

 

[Kiriya]

Great channel with tests - https://www.youtube.com/@prossd/videos
turn on subtitles and enjoy.