Solidigm P44 Pro 1TB SSD Review

The P44 Pro is the second Solidigm-branded SSD to be launched and where the first drive, the P41 Plus,  was aimed at the value end of the market, the flagship client P44 Pro SSD has been designed to cater for the needs of high-performance gaming, content creation, and PC workstation segments. It also meets the published requirements for the Sony PS5 but in this case, will need a heatsink.

The P41 Plus is a DRAMless design built around a combination of a 4-channel controller and QLC NAND. The P41 Pro uses a much more conventional approach of an eight-channel controller looking after 3D TLC NAND. The controller in question is an SK hynix product, code-named Aries. Manufactured on a 12nm process the ACNS075 is an eight-channel controller with a transfer rate of 1600MT/s for each channel. Internally the ACNS075 uses quad-core Cortex-R5 architecture. With the 1TB P44 Pro, this is looking after a pair of SK hynix 176-Layer 3D TLC packages

Solidigm rates the Sequential performance of the 1TB P44 Pro as up to 7,000MB/s for reads and up to 6,500MB/s for writes. Testing the drive with the ATTO benchmark we couldn't quite reach the official maximums for either reads or writes. However, the test results of 6,890MB/s for reads and 6,160MB/s for writes are the fastest figures we've seen to date for a consumer 1TB class drive. Switching over to the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we could confirm both official figures with test results of 7,384MB/s (reads) and 6,578MB/s (writes).

Random 4K performance for the P44 Pro is up to 1,400,000 IOPS for reads and 1,300,000 IOPS for writes. With our four-threaded testing, we couldn't get close to either of these figures with a best-read result of 390,029 IOPS at a QD of 8 with writes at 313,446 IOPS at QD32. The best random read/write performance figures we saw from testing came from the Peak Performance profile in CrystalDiskMark 8 at 648,842.29 IOPS and 545,564.21 IOPS respectively.

Solidigm backs the drive with a couple of useful downloads,  Solidigm Storage Driver and Solidigm Storage Tool. Solidigm claims that by using this driver instead of the default Windows it can deliver read and write speeds up to 21% higher than the standard version. We used the driver to test the P44 Pro but we did do some testing with the standard Windows driver to see if we could see any performance improvements. The most significant advantage we saw came when the drive was tested with CrystalDiskMark 8's 4K QD1 Thread 1 test, using the Solidigm driver saw the write performance rise from 243.182MB/s to 300.244MB/s.

As you might have gathered from its name, the Solidigm Storage Tool is their SSD management utility. Although not as flashy as some utilities offered by some of Solidigm's competitors it has all you really need to keep the drive in good shape.

The P44 Pro doesn't have any sort of heatsink fitted and although we got pretty close to the maximum of 70° C during some of our test runs we didn't see any indications of any throttling. But as always with a Gen 4 drive, it would be prudent to use any motherboard cooling available.

We found the 1TB Solidigm P44 Pro on ebuyer.com for £122.99 (inc VAT) HERE.

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Pros

• Overall Performance.
• Solidigm Storage Tool.
• Solidigm Storage Driver.

Cons

• Couldn't hit the maximum official 4K figures under testing.
• Lack of heatsink.

KitGuru says: Solidigm's first branded SSD aimed at the higher end of the market is quite some drive. The 1TB version of the drive we tested topped our results charts on a number of occasions.

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