SK Hynix Gold S31 1TB SSD Review

The SSD Benchmark Test System

Before we look at the numbers, lets take a brief look at the test system that was used!

We went with an Intel Z390 platform to test storage drives and used the MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC (MS-7B17) motherboard. The board was tested with BIOS 7B17vA6 installed, which came out in August 2019. An Intel Core i5-9600K 6-core processor was run in the board along with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER graphics card.

During setup we enabled Intel XMP on the Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 16GB 3600MHz memory kit and disabled the Intel C-State option in the BIOS. We made the decision to turn off the processor C-States as many synthetic storage drive tests don’t put enough load on the processor to properly show the max IOPS of the storage drive. This is the only reason we disabled C-States.

Once Windows 10 Pro v1903 (build 118362.418) was installed from the latest ISO we applied all Microsoft Windows updates and drivers (Intel Chipset Driver v10.1.17968.8131 and Intel Management Engine Interface v1912.12.0.1246). We did this on October 15th, 2019, so it has all the latest patches up to that point. After setting up the primary disk the way we wanted it (we disabled things like windows defender, windows update, disk fragmentation, super fetch) and then used Acronis True Image 2020 ($45) to clone the drive. Using the Clone Disk function we made an image that is used on all of the drives in our test suite. This ensures that the operating system is setup exactly the same on every drive. We are reviewing the SSD as the primary drive with data on it versus as a secondary drive without data on it. Most sites benchmark SSDs as an empty secondary drive and that is something we are not doing.

The end result is a test image of Windows 10 Pro that is 107GB in size. This number is again important because many drives now have dynamic SLC cache and the used space on the drive will impact how much SLC cache is available. All testing was done on the desktop with no active internet connection.

Intel Z390 Test Bench

Intel LGA 1151 Test Platform
Component	Brand/Model	Live Pricing
Processor	Intel Core i5-9600K	Click Here
Motherboard	MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC	Click Here
Video Card	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super	Click Here
Memory	Corsair Dominator RGB 3600MHz 16GB	Click Here
OS Drive	Drive Being Reviewed	Click Here
Power Supply	Corsair RM850x	Click Here
Operating System	Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit	Click Here

CrystalDiskInfo 8.3.1 Readout:

The readout on CrystalDiskInfo 8.3.1 shows that the SK Hynix Gold S31 drive series supports S.M.A.R.T., APM, NCQ and TRIM . The drive we received had firmware version 90000Q00 installed and that is the version that we used for general testing and benchmarking.

SK Hynix has this drive labeled as 1TB, but the overall capacity shows up as 930GB in Windows 10 version 1903. Please remember that 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. A certain portion of capacity may be used for system file and maintenance use, thus the actual available capacity may differ from the labeled total capacity.

Let’s have a look at the performance!