Solidigm P44 Pro Linux Performance

A few months back we looked at the Solidigm P41 Plus NVMe SSD from this company that formed when SK hynix acquired Intel's NAND/SSD business. The P41 Plus was a budget-friendly consumer SSD with QLC memory while recently they launched the P44 Pro as a step-up and based on the SK hynix Platinum P41 design. I've been testing the Solidigm P44 Pro 1TB and 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs under Linux to great performance.

The Solidigm P44 Pro solid-state drives currently come in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities that all make use of an SK hynix Aries controller, SK hynix LPDDR4 DRAM and SK hynix 176L TLC memory, The 1TB and 2TB models are rated for sequential writes up to 6,500 MB/s and sequential reads up to 7,000 MB/s. With the two higher-end P44 Pro drives there is a 1.4M random read IOPS rating and 1.3M random write IOPS.

Solidigm kindly sent over review samples on the P44 Pro 1TB (SSDPFKKW010X7) and P44 Pro 2TB (SSDPFKKW020X7) drives for review and testing on Phoronix. All of the P44 Pro SSDs are backed by a five year warranty and the 1TB drive is rated for 700TBW endurance and the 2TB model at 1200TBW.

As of writing the Solidigm P44 Pro 1TB drive is currently retailing for around $130 USD and the 2TB version for around $209~219 USD, which is quite competitive with other high-end PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs. Also it's worth noting that the P44 Pro is available in-stock from a number of popular Internet retailers with relatively robust availability it seems.

To no real surprise, the Solidigm P44 Pro SSDs have been working under Linux with ease. No compatibility issues to note or any other troubles coming about with either the SSDPFKKW010X7 or SSDPFKKW020X7. As one ding though to the Linux positioning for the drives: Solidigm currently doesn't have firmware upgrade support via LVFS/Fwupd (besides maintaining the Intel 670p firmware on LVFS), sadly, but at least their firmware is upgradeable using their Bootable Firmware Update Tool via USB storage. Hopefully Solidigm adds LVFS/Fwupd support in the future for making it easier to upgrade their SSD firmware under Linux like there was during the Intel SSD days.