My personal gaming PC build has been in its current state since November of 2021 after adding a second M.2 NVMe SSD. For the most part, it has served me quite well and I haven’t had any issues with it. However, I was using that second drive as my installation drive for games but I am finding that it just isn’t enough space these days. Games have become increasingly larger in size and I frequently need to delete older games that I haven’t played to install new ones. So when the opportunity arose to upgrade, I took it. SK Hynix sent over their latest SK hynix Platinum P41 SSD PCIe NVMe M.2 in a 2TB size, I knew it was time.
INSTALLATION PROCESS
The installation wasn’t a straight remove and replace. I had to purchase a separate M.2 NVMe SSD external drive enclosure and clone my original game drive to the new SK hynix Platinum P41 SSD. This was done by inserting the new drive into the enclosure and connecting it to my PC via a USB-C connection. I then used Seagate’s DiskWizard app for the cloning process.
The process is fairly simple where you just choose the source disk and then the destination disk and that’s pretty much it. The rest of the process is fairly automatic and quick since I was cloning from one NVMe to another.
After that was done, then I was able to replace my game drive with the new drive inside my computer.
SPEED AND PERFORMANCE
My original game drive was a Sandisk Ultra NVMe 3D SSD. It was okay in terms of speed and did what it needed to do. This is the drive that we’ll be comparing with the SK Hynix Platinum P41 SSD. For benchmarking, I used an app called CrystalDiskMark to test read and write speeds. As a refresher, my test computer is running an AMD Ryzen 5600G, 32GB RAM @ 3200 CL16, and has an NVIDIA RTX 3070 FE.
Now I’m not going to pretend like I even know what CrystalDiskMark is testing for, but here’s a site that at least explains a bit what each test is testing for.
Basically, the first test SEQ1M Q8T1, is testing the sequential read and write speeds of large files, but with eight processes in the queue. As you can see from the results, it thoroughly bested my original drive. The same goes for the second test of SEQ1M Q1T1. This is also a sequential read-and-write test for large files but with only one process in the queue.
It isn’t until we come to the third test called RND4K Q32T16 that something interesting happens. This is a test that will read and write data from 14 blocks of 4 kibibytes size with 32 processes in the queue on 16 threads. I don’t really understand what this means, but basically, my original drive here is faster.
Lastly, the RND4K Q1T1 is the same test as above, but with only one process in the queue on one thread. Here, SK hynix Platinum P41 SSD was faster reading. but not writing.
So does any of this really matter? For gaming, the faster your drive is, the faster you’ll be able to load into the game. That’s about it. It means less wait time for you which as a gamer, load times can be very annoying. All I know is I barely have to wait from the moment I launch a game to the moment it loads up.
FINAL THOUGHTS
In all honesty, it’s very hard to actually notice anything different between my original drive and the SK hynix Platinum P41 SSD. That’s because these M.2 NVMe SSD drives are so fast already compared to other storage mediums. The main reason for upgrading I’ll admit is the larger drive size, though the faster speeds are a welcome feature. Time will tell how the SK Hynix Platinum P41 SSD holds up over time, but for now, it was a smooth upgrade.
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