Solidigm P44 Pro review

Soligim’s P44 Professional is the quickest PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD total that we’ve examined. It’s additionally particularly adept at random operations, making it an important alternative for an working system drive. Random ops are even quicker after you put in Solidigm’s personal Synergy Home windows driver. Sure, Solidigm (née Intel) gives a top-notch NVMe driver. You don’t see that day-after-day.

Additional studying: See our roundup of one of the best SSDs to study competing merchandise.

Design & Options

The Solidigm P44 Professional is the primary NVMe SSD we’ve seen for a few months with DRAM onboard (1MB per gigabyte) for caching. The host reminiscence bus (DRAM-less) designs which have proliferated and dominated our protection have made nice strides performance-wise, however DRAM cache nonetheless makes for faster random efficiency.

The P44 Professional sports activities the frequent 2280 (22mm huge, 80mm lengthy) kind issue and is offered in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB flavors. Pricing appears to be in every single place. I discovered the small fry for as little as $40, the 1TB for $67, and the 2TB for $110 on Newegg, whereas present pricing on Amazon is barely greater (for 512GB and1TB) to dramatically greater for 2TB. For what it’s value, Solidigm quoted me $40, $60 and $110, respectively, so store rigorously and be affected person — these costs are positive to indicate up.

Within the UK, we are able to’t discover any official RRPs and the costs range between the likes of Amazon, Box and CCL.

The quoted costs aren’t absolutely the lowest for NVMe SSDs today, however they’re remarkably low for honest-to-goodness onboard DRAM main cache.

Solidigm warranties the P44 Professional for 5 years with mitigating TBW (terabytes that could be written) rankings of 500 for the 512GB, 750 for the 1TB, and 1,250 for the 2TB. These aren’t the biggest we’ve seen, however they’re workable and symbolize much more knowledge than the common consumer will write over the higher a part of a decade.

Efficiency

We after all examined the P44 Professional with each the usual Home windows driver and Solidigm’s Synergy driver, then measured the outcomes in opposition to a number of equally priced PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

Whereas not the quickest in each CrystalDiskMark 8 take a look at, the P44 Professional was simply the quickest total of the drives proven. The truth is, it completed fourth amongst all of the SSDs we’ve examined — behind solely the three PCIe 5.0 SSDs on our charts (Essential T700, Seagate FireCuda 540, and Gigabyte Aorus Gen 5 10,000).

As you’ll be able to see under, the P44 Professional could be very quick with random operations, and will get even quicker once you set up the Solidigm Home windows driver.

The P44 Professional was additionally very quick at our 48GB transfers, tying the Teamgroup MP44 for quickest time within the group. The Synergy driver might or might not have affected this take a look at — it’s too near name. Be aware that even our smaller recordsdata are significantly bigger (32KB to 3MB) than what can be thought-about one of many random operations the Synergy driver excels at.

Whereas nonetheless round 40 seconds slower than the quickest 450GB write we’ve seen (learn our Sabrent Rocket This autumn and Essential T700 evaluations), the P44 Professional was nonetheless very quick. Be aware that the synergy driver appeared to decrease sequential throughput barely in favor or random efficiency. However the lower is tiny, and inside the margin of error for these assessments.

Be aware that the newest TLC NAND has seen a pointy enhance in efficiency over earlier generations. When employed as secondary cache (SLC mode), it may be written at properly over 3GBps, and even in TLC/3-bit mode the velocity solely drops to round 1.5GBps. The one time you’ll see extreme drops with the newest NAND is when the controller should do housekeeping to liberate area.

Examine that with the drops of previous-gen NAND to 500MBps, and generations earlier than that to 100MBps or much less, and you may see why you desire a late-model SSD in your system. This modifies our recommendation on shopping for double the capability you want. That also holds true if you need high efficiency on a regular basis, however 1.5GBps is hardly a tragic write fee for an SSD.

Do you have to purchase the Solidigm P44 Professional?

If I had been on the lookout for a PCIe 4.0 SSD as my foremost storage, the Solidigm P44 Professional is the drive I’d go for. It can save you a buck or two with an HMB design, however the uptick in random efficiency from the P44 Professional’s DRAM cache is properly value the additional coin in my e-book. Offered!

This evaluation initially appeared on PCWorld.

How we take a look at

Inside drive assessments at the moment make the most of Home windows 11, 64-bit operating on an X790 (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (64GB of reminiscence complete). Each 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 4 are built-in to the again panel and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. The 48GB switch assessments make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk taking on 58GB of the 64GB of complete reminiscence. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Professional 2TB which additionally runs the OS.

Every take a look at is carried out on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Be aware that in regular use, as a drive fills up, efficiency will lower because of much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different components.

Caveat: The efficiency numbers proven apply solely to the drive we had been shipped and to the capability examined. SSD efficiency can and can range by capability because of extra or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes throughout and the quantity of NAND accessible for secondary caching. Distributors additionally often swap elements. In case you ever discover a big discrepancy between the efficiency you expertise and that which we report, by all means, tell us.