I have had the drive for a few months now. It was on sale by Biwin on amazon for around $200 when the "faster/better" drives listed were closer to $250.
The "heat spreader" isn't graphene. Graphene is conductive. This pad has no conductivity whatsoever. It's just a thermal transfer foam.
I was clued into this when I noticed that all of the reviewers they sent drives to got a metal heat sink along with it, and many tested with that heat sink. That told me that Biwin/HP don't really trust the foam pad to do the job, and didn't want reviews coming out with just the foam pad.
If you use the alleged "graphene" heat sink, the controller gets too hot and it throttles a lot. I pulled it off first thing and put it into one of those cool looking sabrent metal heat sinks with the little heat pipes. It comes off in one piece, smoothly, and remains sticky. I stuck it on an old gen 3 drive that really doesn't need a heat spreader, and it's stayed stuck on, upside down, for a few months so I think it's on there fine?
The sabrent works a treat. It soaks up some heat, the drive sits around 50c and never moves much up or down, regardless of what you're doing to it. If I had any airflow on it, it'd probably drop under 40, but its in a secondary gen 4 slot down the bottom of the mobo, and it's not really getting any. In any case. 50c is fine. Flash tends to perform better when its a little warm, as long as we stay away from too-warm!
I load games from it, via steam or xbox live gamepass. A huge game takes under 2 seconds. So I'm not sure what any additional performance would be like.
My second gen 4 drive and my first super fast one (the other is a 5000/3500 drive). These simply won't run without a heck of a heat sink. The hynix might be an exception. I have their gen 3 drive and its both fast AND doesn't make a lot of heat, due to the high bit density nand and the very efficient controller, so perhaps the P41 would be okay with a lesser cooler attached?
I suspect the little thin "graphene" heat spreader is on there for playstation 5 clearance reasons? I don't have a ps5 so I can't say. Those won't need as much of a heat sink; they aren't transferring data persistently.
The other end of this to consider with regards to performance is what the heck are you feeding it from, if not another gen 4 or more recently, gen 5 drives? I don't have anything other than an artificial benchmark that pushes this gen 4 drive for more than a few seconds. It's snoozing when I'm copying from a slower nvme drive. I have gigabit internet, and even a full speed download isn't coming close.
As a last note, I see many of the Chinese mini pc makers are dumping Kingston and Netac, for Biwin drives and memory. I just got a Chuwi 5800H box that all of the reviewers got with Netac (whose nvme ssds aren't the most reliable), but mine came with Biwin ram and SSD. I see from the article that they do binning for other companies? I wonder if they get a cheap deal on all of the flash and ram chips that don't pass muster for HP and their other customers?
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