The world's first 128-layer NAND flash-based consumer SSD, the SK Hynix Gold P31, was announced today by Seoul. Self-described as "one of the fastest and most innovative consumer SSDs on the market," SK Hynix claims that its new highly stacked memory chip offers better performance at a lower price and lasts longer.

Or, as SK Hynix succinctly asserts: "This technology enables faster speeds. Excellent, thank you.

Already an industry giant, SK Hynix has been supplying high-quality DRAM and NAND products to favorite tech companies for years, including supplying GDDR6 for Nvidia's graphics cards, but has been a bit slow when it comes to making its own SSDs. Last year they introduced a very standard SATA SSD, the Gold S31, and now they are bringing their first PCIe drive to market.

We eagerly await the next generation of high-speed PCIe 4.0 SSDs, which may be little more than PCIe 3.0 drives. Still, SK Hynix has made a breakthrough innovation in the PCIe SSD space with a proprietary controller and NAND flash memory that rivals top-class chips like the 96-layer silicon in the Samsung 970 EVO Plus.

SK Hynix's Gold P31 has predicted sequential read/write speeds of 3,500 MB/s and 3,200 MB/s respectively, likely on par with Samsung's drives. In addition, the write endurance of the 1TB SSD is projected to be approximately 750 TBW. This is a much better figure than the 600 TBW of Samsung's 970 EVO SSD.

Don't worry, we will recheck these stats as soon as we get them. We do, however, plan to give Gold P31 a try soon. [At the moment, the Gold P31 is available in 1TB and 500GB capacities, comes with a 5-year warranty, and is much cheaper than Samsung's competitors at $135 for the larger drive. Unfortunately, it is PCIe Gen 3 only at this time, but SK Hynix plans to offer a PCIe Gen 4 controller.