SK Hynix P41 Platinum

The SK hynix Platinum P41 PCIe 4.0 SSD comes out ahead of other SSDs we've tested in almost every benchmark. It's competitively priced, it has an excellent TBW rating, and it's available in three capacities. It's an easy recommendation if you want an upgrade for gaming or for productivity.

The SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB drive is awesome. Throughout the majority of our testing, it was competing with the best NVMe SSDs out there. Results vary depending on the benchmark and test suite though. The Platinum P41 is the company's first 176-layer NAND drive to join a rather saturated market. Performance results were a little erratic during our testing, but at times it was the highest performing drive by a wide margin, especially in access times and real-world traces we seem to have a new king in town.

The SK hynix Platinum P41 delivers on expectations with unrivaled performance and power efficiency. It’s the best consumer PCIe 4.0 SSD we’ve tested to date, proving that a winning formula can be made even better.

Overall the best performing flash-based SSD we've ever tested, even faster than the 2TB model.

The SK Hynix Platinum P41 posted record-high scores in some of our general storage and gaming tests. It's a super-value M.2 SSD; just add your own heatsink to ensure peak performance.

The Platinum P41 is a top-tier PCIe 4 NVMe SSD at a very nice price point. Highly recommended.

Those can be found starting at $240 and are definitely worth considering. If you can live with slightly lower performance, the WD Black SN770 2 TB could be an option for $200. While it is DRAM-less, it still offers outstanding performance that rivals much more expensive drives. Of course, there are still all the PCIe 3.0 drives, which are probably fast enough, too, unless you move tons of data all the time, but such a compromise must offer significant cost savings to make it worthwhile.