Solidigm P41 Plus NVMe SSD
Up on the review block today is the Solidigm P41 Plus as a value-focused solid-state drive. Solidigm is the US company formed when SK Hynix acquired Intel's NAND/SSD business. Since forming Solidigm at the end of last year they have continued to sell products from Intel's existing SSD product line-up while last month they announced the P41 Plus as their first consumer solid-state drive of their own design. Recently I've been testing out the Solidigm P41 Plus 1TB and 2TB drives under Linux for seeing how these affordable QLC drives perform.
Solidigm's P41 Plus aims to deliver great speed at great value, hence going the QLC route with a pSLC cache in an afford to still deliver good speeds. The Solidigm P41 Plus is a PCIe 4.0 x4 solid-state drive with 144L QLC NAND and employs the Silicon Motion SM2269XT controller.
The Solidigm P41 Plus product line-up currently consists of 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB models with the highest-end model rated for 4125MB/s sequential reads, 3325MB/s sequential writes, 390k random read IOPS, and 540k random write IOPS. The drives are rated for 200 / 400 / 800 TBW write endurance, respectively. Solidigm is backing the P41 Plus drives with a five year warranty.
The P41 Plus SSDs offer a larger pSLC cache than during the Intel days with the 670p but lack any DRAM and instead just QLC NAND. The newer controller on the P41 Plus drives should help with the performance. These QLC SSDs are competitively priced at $49 for the 512GB model, $89 for the 1TB model, and $169 for the 2TB drive.
Solidigm does produce the Solidigm Synergy software for Windows users to help optimize the drive performance while to no surprise (and like other vendors) doesn't provide any special offerings for Linux users.
For testing these M.2 2280 drives supplied by Solidigm, I benchmarked them against a range of other SSDs on hand. All of the tests were freshly (re)conducted and making use of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS while upgrading to the Linux 6.0 kernel. The drives benchmarked were based on what I had available (and not often benchmarking budget SSDs) and included the:
- Corsair Force MP600 2TB
- Samsung 980 PRO 1TB
- Solidigm P41 Plus 1TB
- Solidigm P41 Plus 2TB
- WD_BLACK SN750 SE 1TB
- WD_BLACK SN850 1TB
- WD_BLACK SN850 2TB
- WD_BLACK SN850X 1TB
Solidigm kindly provided the 1TB and 2TB units as review samples for testing at Phoronix. They provided two of the 1GB drives, which will be interesting for a Linux RAID follow-up benchmarking article.