Solidigm P41 Plus SSD review: SSD drivers actually make a difference

There’s a lot of brands in the SSD arena, from titans like Samsung to newcomers like Solidigm, which was founded in late 2021 and thus hasn’t had much time to make a name for itself yet. However, Solidigm isn’t really a new company; when Intel sold off its SSD division to SK Hynix, it was rebranded to Solidigm, and still advertises the popular budget 660p and 670p drives on its website.

Although the field is already crowded with cheap PCIe 4.0 SSDs, Solidigm’s P41 Plus manages to stand out and proves to be a worthy successor to the 660p and 670p. Solidigm makes the P41 Plus a compelling deal not just thanks to its low price and decent specifications, but also through its Synergy Toolkit application and custom driver support, something that pretty much no other company bothers with anymore.

 

Solidigm P41 Plus

Great value SSD

$100 $110 Save $10

Solidigm’s P41 Plus is a budget PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD that targets good bang for buck in respect to performance and capacity.

Storage capacity

2TB

Hardware Interface

PCIe 4.0

Brand

Solidigm

Transfer rate

4,125/3,325 MB/s read/write

TBW

800

MTBF

1.6 million hours

DRAM

N/A

Price

$100

Controller

Solidigm

Pros

• Very cheap for the 2TB model
• Decent enough performance
• Custom Solidigm software and drivers

Cons

• Sometimes slower than discounted PCIe 3.0 SSDs
• No DRAM cache

Solidigm P41 Plus pricing and availability

The P41 Plus has a few different models: an M.2 2280 drive that comes in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities (which cost $30 to $40, $60, and $100 respectively), and a small M.2 2230 sized drive that appears to only come with 512GB of storage (currently selling for $55). All of these drives are available on Newegg and Amazon. I’m testing the 2TB model in this review, which performs the best out of the whole lineup.

How the Solidigm P41 Plus was tested

I tested the P41 Plus in a modern PC running Windows 11 and using the Ryzen 9 7900X, the Asus ROG Strix B650E-I Gaming motherboard, and 32GB of G.Skill Flare X5 Series DDR5 RAM rated for 6,000MHz and CL36. The P41 Plus doesn’t come with a heatsink and it was not installed under the Strix’s included heatsink, which shouldn’t affect performance since the P41 Plus is a lower power drive. I also tested Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus 1TB, a great SSD that retails for a similar price across all capacities. Both drives were filled to roughly 33% capacity before testing.

My benchmarks of choice were CrystalDiskMark 8 and ATTO Disk Benchmark, which are both synthetic applications that tend to give you a good idea of what kind of performance you can expect. All of the relevant software and firmware was updated for these tests, and I also decided to test the P41 Plus with and without its custom driver or Synergy Toolkit software, which is something Solidigm has been pushing to differentiate itself from its competitors. The Synergy Toolkit’s “fast lane” feature claims to enable up to 120% faster reads on SSDs between 25% and 75% full, while the custom driver purportedly provides better performance than the stock Microsoft SSD driver that the vast majority of brands rely on.

The results: Good performance, especially with customized software support

CrystalDiskMark 8 was benchmarked using default parameters with differing data types, queue depths, threads, and data sizes. These are the four main characteristics that determine how fast or slow it will take to read or write a file, and although CrystalDiskMark’s six distinct tests aren’t comprehensive, they offer a good idea of what kind of performance you can expect with an SSD.

Scores shown are for read/write speeds, measured in MB/s.

The P41 Plus without any help from Synergy software is just a little faster than the 970 EVO Plus, probably due to a combination of using PCIe 4.0 rather than 3.0 and also having newer hardware. However, there are some cases where a low queue depth will swing things in the 970 EVO Plus’s favor, though not by much. When retesting with Synergy installed, not a ton changed for the P41 Plus in five of the six tests. The only test to show a notable performance uplift was the random test with a high queue depth and thread count, which saw performance increase by roughly 25%.

ATTO Disk Benchmark acts very similarly to CrystalDiskMark, only the queue depth is set for all data transfers (a depth of 4 in this case, which is the default) and it tests a wide range of data block sizes scaling from just 512 bytes to 64 megabytes (I cut out everything after 2MB for brevity however). Unlike with CrystalDiskMark however, it’s obvious that Synergy and the custom driver are actually doing something to improve performance, especially at low data sizes.

Scores shown are for read/write speeds, measured in MB/s.

In the 1KB to 16KB range, Synergy was able to boost performance by about 10% to 30% depending on the data size. From 32KB and onward, the performance advantage pretty much disappears, though it seems performance with Synergy is much more consistent than without. Unfortunately for the P41 Plus though, the 970 EVO Plus is significantly faster up until the 128KB mark, and even in larger data sizes it’s not that far behind.

Who should buy the P41 Plus?

You should buy if:

• You want a high-capacity SSD for a great price
• Have PCIe 4.0 support

You shouldn’t buy if:

• You prioritize performance more than capacity
• Have PCIe 3.0 and not PCIe 4.0

Although the P41 Plus doesn’t get a clear victory over a PCIe 3.0 flagship like the 970 EVO Plus, it still has some decent selling points. Although the 1TB models of each drive cost the same at $60, the 2TB model of the P41 Plus is only $100 while the 970 EVO Plus 2TB is $130 at the time of writing. $30 isn’t a ton of money but it’s not insignificant either, and if you’re buying multiple drivers for lots of storage, saving $30 on each drive will add up quickly. However, the P41 Plus doesn’t have a DRAM cache, which may partly explain the drive’s worse performance in some areas.

Solidigm has also proven that Microsoft’s basic SSD driver might be leaving some performance on the table. The P41 Plus is barely even fast enough to benefit from using the PCIe 4.0 interface and it showed some performance improvements in many tests. Synergy Toolkit also proved to be useful thanks to the “fast lane” feature as well as providing a modern UI for SSD monitoring and diagnostics. Software isn’t a silver bullet for the P41 Plus, but it’s definitely nice to have.

 

Solidigm P41 Plus

$100 $110 Save $10

Solidigm’s P41 Plus is a budget PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD that targets good bang for buck in respect to performance and capacity.