The Best NVMe SSD for Laptops and Notebooks: SK hynix Gold P31 1TB SSD Reviewed
by Billy Tallis on August 27, 2020 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
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| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
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The SK hynix Gold P31 doesn't set any performance records for TLC drives on The Destroyer, but it does deliver top-tier scores on every performance metric—competitive with drives like the Samsung 970 EVO Plus and WD Black SN750.
The energy usage by the P31 is unprecedented: it beats even low-power SATA and DRAMless NVMe drives. The P31 uses 30% less energy over the course of the test than the WD Black SN750, our previous record-holder for most efficient high-performance NVMe SSD. Meanwhile, most of the other fastest drives require two to three times the energy to complete The Destroyer.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
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| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
The Gold P31 has great performance on the Heavy test, especially on the full-drive test run where it maintains fast read latencies better while most of the TLC competition falls behind by at least a little bit.
The energy usage of the Gold P31 is again in a different league from other high-end NVMe drives. The Toshiba/Kioxia BG4 is narrowly ahead on this measure, but that's the slowest NVMe drive in this batch. As with The Destroyer, the WD Black's previously class-leading efficiency is beat by at least 30%.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
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| Average Data Rate | |||||||||
| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
The SK hynix Gold P31's overall performance on the Light test is just a few percent slower than the first-place drives, but as with the Heavy test we see the P31 handling the full-drive test run better than the competition. This time, the P31 doesn't quite manage to beat the energy usage scores from the Toshiba/Kioxia BG4 or its SATA sibling the Gold S31, but compared to the rest of the NVMe drives the story remains the same: the P31 sets a new power efficiency goal for the competition to aim for.
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jaydee - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
Thanks Billy! Reading the part about the power efficiency though, any thoughts of quantifying the extra battery life you could expect to see (typical laptop) from the SK Hynix Gold P31 over a Phison E12? The numbers look impressive on paper in terms of percentages against other HDs, but what are we talking about? An extra.. 5/10/15/20 minutes under an extreme R/W heavy workload? What about an average R/W workload? For sure the price/performance is there too so it appears a good buy anyway, I just don't know what to make of the efficiency numbers in terms of actual computing experience.Jimster480 - Saturday, September 5, 2020 - link
I just put this into my new Ryzen 4600H Powered Nitro 5 and it beats my EX920 in everything! Really a leap in performance and power consumption that wasn't expected from SK Hynix that has been an Also-ran until now!rlr297 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Is there an update on when the platinum drives will be released? I am looking for a 2TB variant. If not, do you have a 2TB drive you'd recommend for a laptop?MatthiasM - Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - link
Hi All: Can I please ask for collective wisdom? I was very impressed by the review of this drive, especially the low power consumption for laptops. So, I bought one for my 2017 MacBook Air. This can use NVME drive with a Sintech Adapter, no problem. Several other NVME drive (WD, ADTA) run without problems. But when I built in this SK Hynix drive, it wouldn't start. It initiates the boot process, but won't complete it. But when I insert the drive in an external enclosure, it starts from it as boot drive, no problem. Only when it is internal, it won't start. Any suggestions? NVME controller incompatible with MacBook? Any ideas on how to fix this?oRAirwolf - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
A little late to the fold, but there was a comment about drive software and firmware updates. SK Hynix released a tool for this drive called Drive Manager: Easy Kit. It's available at the very bottom of this page: https://ssd.skhynix.com/GoldP31.htmlEarFull - Sunday, February 7, 2021 - link
Totally over my head, I bought one of these off Amazon after finding out Hynix supplies OEM SSD's for Apple laptops. Thought I'd play with it as a peripheral plug in. Problem is, I can't find an external enclosure that is appropriate for it. I wrote Hynix and they commented it is only for INTERNAL use. Does anyone KNOW of an external enclosure suitable for this 1TB Hynix P31 Gold Drive? I don't care now if it is USB or Thunderbolt. Thank you.EarFull - Sunday, February 7, 2021 - link
Tried the Hynix P31 Gold NVME in the OWC Envoy Express: did not work. Now OWC site states in this configuration only available for Windows 10. Bummer.EarFull - Thursday, February 11, 2021 - link
Posted a comment two days ago and can't find it. To reiterate: bought Hynix P31Gold NVME to use as external drive. OWC Envoy Express will NOT work in this configuration on macOS. So, bought this SSK Aluminum M.2 NVME SSD Enclosure Adapter, USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) to NVME PCI-E M-Key Solid State Drive External Enclosure (Fits only NVMe PCIe 2242/2260/2280) to try. Indeed, it works perfectly for about $20. The enclosure is well made, metal, and comes with extra NVME 'screws' and such and two cabes for USB-C to USB-C as well as USB-C to USB-A. Hope this helps. PatrickDavidm771 - Friday, November 26, 2021 - link
Anyone know how the P31 Gold compares in terms of power efficiency against an SN730 OEM nvme drive? Read the specs of the SN730 and the power states are really low mostly except the PS1+2 numbers are better on the P31 Gold. Thankssrahman5317 - Friday, January 21, 2022 - link
Thank you so much guys. This was perfect and exactly the kind of reporting I was looking for. Much love from a laptop user