Introduction

Hynix has been one of the “big three” memory manufacturers for decades. Together with Samsung and Micron they have been dominating the memory market and are producing a substantial percentage of the world’s DRAM and NAND memory. A few years ago the company “Hynix”, which was originally founded as “Hyundai Electronics Industrial Co” in 1983, was sold to “SK Group”—a large Korean conglomerate, hence the name “SK Hynix”. Just last year, Hynix decided to purchase Intel’s NAND business for $9 billion.

The SK Hynix Gold P31 SSD was announced in October last year and has since been receiving attention from enthusiasts. Today we finally bring you our review of the Hynix Gold P31, which is built with only Hynix components—an ability that only Samsung had in the past. The controller is an in-house design by Hynix, called ACNT038 or “Cepheus”. The flash chips are modern 128-layer 3D TLC. A LPDDR4-3733 DRAM chip provides 1 GB of memory for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The Hynix Gold P31 comes in capacities of 512 GB ($75) and 1 TB ($135). Endurance for these models is set to 500 TBW and 750 TBW respectively. Hynix includes a five-year warranty with the Gold P31.