Introduction

Hynix has been one of the "big three" memory manufacturers for decades. Together with Samsung and Micron, they have been dominating the memory market and are producing a substantial percentage of the world's DRAM and NAND memory. A few years ago, the company "Hynix," which was originally founded as "Hyundai Electronics Industrial Co" in 1983, was sold to "SK Group"—a large Korean conglomerate, hence the name "SK hynix." Just last year, Hynix decided to purchase Intel's NAND business for $9 billion.



Hynix has entered the high-end premium SSD market relatively late, but left quite an impression after the Gold P31, which is the fastest PCIe 3.0 solid-state drive available on the market. It seems the engineers at Hynix know exactly what they are doing—that's why I'm so excited to review the Hynix Platinum P41 today. As expected, the P41 introduces support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, which doubles transfer rates over what Gen 3 offered.

Internally, the Hynix Platinum P41 uses only in-house components made by Hynix—an important competitive advantage. As the controller, Hynix uses an in-house developed ACNS075 also known as "Aries." It uses eight flash channels and has support for NVMe version 1.4, and of course PCI-Express 4.0. The flash chips are made by Hynix, too, and are of their new 176-layer 3D TLC variant. Last but not least, a DRAM cache is included; it's 2 GB large and powered by a single DDR4-4266 chip made by, you guessed it, Hynix.

The SK hynix Platinum P41 comes in capacities of 500 GB ($105), 1 TB ($150), and 2 TB ($260). Endurance for these models is set to 500 TBW, 750 TBW, and 1200 TBW respectively. Hynix includes a five-year warranty with the P41 Platinum SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Platinum P41 connects to the host system using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, two flash chips, and a DRAM chip. The other side of the PCB is empty.

Chip Component Analysis

The Hynix ACNS075 controller is a new in-house development by Hynix with support for PCI-Express 4.0. Unfortunately, not much is known about this controller yet.


The two flash chips are Hynix 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


One Hynix LPDDR4-4266 chip provides 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup