SK hynix Prices - SSDs, Server RAM & Solidigm

The maker you probably already own something from

Most people who have bought a computer in the last decade own SK hynix silicon without having chosen it. It arrives inside laptops as an OEM SSD, inside servers as registered ECC memory, and inside enterprise storage arrays under a different brand name entirely. The company is one of the three that between them control the overwhelming majority of the world's DRAM output, and it is one of a very small number that fabricate their own NAND flash as well.

That vertical position is the reason this page exists in the shape it does. Most storage brands are assemblers: they buy flash from someone, buy a controller from someone else, and ship the combination under their own name. SK hynix makes its own NAND, develops its own controllers and writes its own firmware for its consumer drives. Whether that produces a better product is a question this page will not answer, because answering it requires measurements we have not made. What it does produce is a supply position, and a supply position is something you can reason about without a benchmark.

The practical consequence for a buyer is that this one company's decisions touch three different purchases you might be making, and nobody presents them together. If you are pricing a consumer SSD, an ECC memory upgrade for a server, and an enterprise U.2 drive, you are pricing three markets that share a manufacturer. This page is those three markets in one place, with live prices on each.

The three surfaces below are not equally deep, and we say so rather than padding. One of them is currently a single product, for a reason that is itself the most useful thing on this page.

Surface one: the consumer SSDs

SK hynix sells consumer NVMe drives under three names, and the ladder now has a rung most buying guides have not caught up with. The Gold P31 is the PCIe Gen3 drive, the Platinum P41 is the Gen4 one, and the Platinum P51 - launched in April 2025 on 238-layer TLC NAND with SK hynix's own Alistar controller - is the Gen5 flagship the company actually sells today. In specification terms that is a clean good-better-best progression. The buying reality is not a ladder at all, for reasons covered in the availability section below: the two Platinum drives are the two you cannot currently buy through this channel.

The Gold P31's genuine role is worth stating plainly rather than inflating. It is a Gen3 drive in a market that has largely moved to Gen4 and beyond, and its reputation was built on efficiency rather than on topping charts: it was aimed at laptops and small-form-factor builds where power draw and heat matter as much as anything else. That is a real and current use case. In a laptop with a Gen3 M.2 slot, a Gen4 drive gains you nothing the host can carry, and the Gen3 drive is the appropriate part rather than a compromise.

SK hynix states a five-year warranty on the Gold P31 on its own product page. On endurance the same page publishes a single figure covering the 2TB capacity, and no per-capacity breakdown. The capacity we currently track is the 500GB, and because the maker does not publish an endurance rating for that specific capacity, our table renders it as unverified rather than carrying a number from a secondary source. Review coverage does publish a figure. It is not the manufacturer's specification page, and on a warranty limit that distinction is the whole point.

For a PlayStation 5, Sony's published storage-expansion requirements specify a PCIe Gen4 M.2 NVMe drive with a heat-dissipation mechanism. A Gen3 drive does not meet that Gen4 requirement, so the Gold P31 is not the console answer, and we would rather say that than let a brand page imply otherwise. Our PS5 cluster covers what does fit.

Surface two: the server memory

The second surface is registered ECC memory, and it is the deepest of the three in our catalogue. These are the modules that go into rack servers rather than desktops: buffered, error-correcting, and sold in capacities that make no sense outside a machine with a lot of slots. We price them per gigabyte rather than per module, because a 32GB stick and a 128GB stick are not comparable on sticker price and comparing them that way is how people end up paying more per gigabyte for the privilege of using fewer slots.

The market context for these prices is the same one our memory-shortage analysis has been documenting, and the figures below are that analysis's, not new claims. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron control over 95% of global DRAM output. All three have shifted wafer capacity toward High Bandwidth Memory for AI accelerators, which consumed roughly 23% of global DRAM wafers in 2026 against 8% in 2024. HBM earns three to five times the revenue per wafer of conventional DDR5, which makes the reallocation a rational decision with painful downstream consequences for anyone buying server memory.

One of those figures is specifically about this manufacturer, and it is the one to hold onto while reading the table. SK Hynix has confirmed that its entire 2026 HBM production is already committed. Capacity that is committed to HBM is capacity that is not making DDR4 and DDR5 RDIMMs, and that is the mechanism connecting an AI accelerator you will never buy to the price of a memory module you might.

What the table gives you against that backdrop is the current cost per gigabyte across the modules we can actually source, DDR4 and DDR5 together. The generational spread in this market is wide enough that the cheapest module per gigabyte and the newest module are rarely the same thing, and which one is right for you is decided by your platform rather than by the price. Our price index tracks the movement over time and our shortage tracker covers the causes in full.

Surface three: Solidigm, and why it counts as the same maker

The third surface trades under a different name, and the connection is not obvious unless you already know it. In October 2020 SK hynix agreed to acquire Intel's NAND memory and storage business for around nine billion dollars. To run the acquired SSD business it established a new US subsidiary, Solidigm, headquartered in San Jose. The first phase of that transaction completed on 30 December 2021 and the second phase closed in March 2025, at which point the acquisition was complete.

So a Solidigm enterprise SSD is a product of the business SK hynix bought from Intel, operating as an SK hynix subsidiary. The engineering lineage runs back to Intel's NAND division, which is why these drives have their own design character rather than reading as rebadged SK hynix parts, and it is why the model naming follows Intel's old conventions instead of the consumer line's.

For a buyer the practical implication is about who stands behind the drive. Support and warranty for these products moved to Solidigm rather than remaining with Intel, so a drive bought years ago under Intel branding is now serviced by a company most people have never heard of, owned by a company they probably have. If you are looking at an enterprise U.2 drive and wondering whether the vendor will still exist in five years, the ownership structure is the relevant fact and it is a matter of public record.

Our Solidigm inventory is listed below with live pricing where a drive is buyable. Where we track a model that currently has no offer, it is shown and marked rather than hidden, and it is excluded from the ranking so a price nobody can pay never sets the benchmark. The wider datacenter NVMe category has the full cross-brand picture.

Why one company's decisions move all three tables

The reason to put these three surfaces on one page is not tidiness. It is that they share an input, and during a supply squeeze that shared input becomes visible in all three prices at once.

Wafer capacity is the shared input. A fabrication plant's output is finite and allocating it to one product means not allocating it to another. When the economics favour High Bandwidth Memory as strongly as our shortage analysis documents, the reallocation shows up as scarcity in the products that lost the argument. That is a DRAM story most directly, which is why the memory surface is where it bites hardest, but NAND production competes for the same capital and the same manufacturing attention, and the enterprise SSD tier has moved for related reasons.

This also explains something about the consumer surface that would otherwise look like a data problem. A product line thinning out at retail, to the point where a flagship has no listings at all, is what a supply-constrained manufacturer's consumer channel looks like when higher-margin demand exists elsewhere. We are not claiming to know that is the cause here; we are noting that the pattern is consistent and that the alternative explanations are equally unverifiable from outside. What we can state is what our own catalogue shows, which is the next section.

The honest summary is that these three tables are not independent readings. Read together they are three views of one manufacturer's allocation decisions, and that is a perspective no single-category comparison page can give you.

Other drive families we track

Each of these carries the same live pricing and, where the family mixes recording technologies or interfaces, the same per-model decoder.

CMR drive list · Recertified guide · NAS devices · External drives

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