Get an SK Hynix Gold P31 NVMe SSD 1TB for $92.58 (was $109.99)
The P31 Gold is rated for read speeds of up to 3500MB/s, about the limit for PCIe 3.0 drives, with write speeds of up to 3200MB/s. The drive comes with an impressive five year warranty too, and is rated for up to 1200 terabytes written - twice as much as the similarly-priced WD SN570. The Gold P31 has yet to be reviewed by RPS, but it’s received positive analysis from a wide range of publications including Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech and PCMag. These outlets recommended the P31 for its high performance, ranking it amongst the very fastest PCIe 3.0 drives, with each site also noting its absurdly low power usage, durability and five year warranty. The only issue identified was that the drive doesn’t come with an extensive software suite like alternatives from Samsung or Crucial - just a customised version of Macrium Reflect for hard drive and SSD cloning. I don’t think the software loadout will be a deal-breaker for most people, and certainly wouldn’t dissaude me from picking up the drive if I lived in the US - but alas, this same drive costs £138 ($176) in the UK so I’m out of luck. I think that’s more or less everything you need to know about this drive if you’re considering it for a desktop PC, but I’d like to drill down into power usage for the benefit of the laptop people out there. Normally, you expect high-performance NVMe SSDs, whether 3.0 or 4.0, to draw a lot of power. This isn’t the case for the Gold P31 - Anandtech measured it drawing less power than many SATA SSDs while operating at considerably faster speeds. This is down to the drive’s 128-layer 3D NAND flash memory and a specially-tuned controller, both of which are made by SK Hynix themselves rather than a third party. The long and short of it is this legendary power efficiency makes this drive a particularly canny choice for laptop owners, as replacing an average NVMe SSD with this one will extend your battery life a bit - and adding it to a free slot in a laptop with an existing SSD will have a minimal impact on battery life. Still, no matter what device you put it in, this is a great SSD at a reasonable price - so do consider it if you’re hankering for some extra super-fast storage.
