Solidigm P41 Plus NVMe SSD

First up to mention again - the Samsung 980 PRO under Linux continues to exhibit very poor performance in select database workloads as shown over a number of months. When it comes to SQLite performance on the Solidigm P41 Plus, the performance was very good for this purely write-focused SQLite test with this embedded database library being used by a variety of desktop applications.

The MariaDB/MySQL server performance comes in at good value for those trying to setup a cheap Linux box for database server testing, local LAMP development, or a low-cost SOHO server where performance isn't a key priority. Again, the very low Samsung 980 PRO SSD performance under Linux for database workloads is what I've been seeing across multiple drives locally as some Samsung issue under Linux - at least the Solidigm drives have been behaving fine under Linux.

Similarly, the PostgreSQL performance was decent considering the value focus of the Solidigm P41 Plus drives.

While Solidigm may be a new name to many of you and may be especially hesitant to trust a storage device from a new company, it's a subsidiary of SK Hynix built from Intel's NAND/SSD business and building off that existing IP. For some added comfort these drives are also backed by a five year warranty, Launching a QLC-based PCIe 4.0 SSD in H2'2022 isn't that exciting from a technical/performance perspective but Solidigm does deliver on where it set its sights on for this series: delivering an affordable solid-state drive with decent performance. From that perspective they have succeeded and the P41 Plus 1TB drive can indeed be found for $89 USD at Amazon (affiliate link) or the 2TB drive for $191 USD (affiliate link, over on NewEgg it's $169). If performance is even less of a concern and not needing much storage space like for a Linux developer test box, the P41 Plus 512GB model is retailing at just $49. Moving forward it will be interesting to see what new products Solidigm introduces as it continues to evolve beyond where Intel left off in the NAND/SSD business.

For those thinking about building an affordable Linux SSD RAID array, I'll have up some benchmarks of the P41 Plus 1TB in RAID 0/1 under native Btrfs RAID and the like shortly in its own article on Phoronix.