Damn, son. That’s a ton of fast storage for the money.

So what’s the catch? Well, this is a QLC drive, so we can expect worse longevity (but more GBs per dollar) than an equivalent TLC drive. However, it’s still great for bursty workloads, offering 390K random reads and 540K random writes - about half to one-third the speed of the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives, but significantly faster than PCIe 3.0 and SATA alternatives. Peak sequential speeds are also good, at 4125MB/s reads and 3325MB/s writes - not bad at all!

If you’re not familiar with SK Hynix, they’re the makers of a high percentage of the world’s flash memory, being part of the ‘big five’ alongside Samsung, Crucial/Micron, WD/SanDisk and Kioxia/Toshiba. That means that Solidigm/SK Hynix can rely on their own in-house flash and controllers, allowing tight integration between components and hitting price points that companies thatdon’tmake their own components can’t match.