At first we would like to thank Crucial for sending a sample of their P5 Plus 2TB PCIe M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 Gaming SSD for testing and reviewing.

 

 

About Crucial:

 

“Looking for computer memory or a new storage drive? You've come to the right place!

 

Crucial is a global brand of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the largest memory and flash storage manufacturers in the world. We make computer memory upgrades (DRAM) and solid state drives (SSDs), and offer more than 250,000 upgrades for over 50,000 systems. For 17 years, we've sought to provide the Crucial Difference — award-winning products, outstanding support, and a team of memory and storage experts who explain complex lingo in everyday terms. We're here to help improve the performance of your system.

 

Crucial memory and SSDs have been qualified and approved by major original equipment manufacturers, and every single module that leaves our doors has been rigorously tested at the component and module level. That's a big deal in the memory industry, but it's not all. When it comes to our SSDs, each drive undergoes over a thousand hours of prerelease validation testing and hundreds of qualification tests to ensure optimal reliability and performance.

 

To find upgrades in just a few clicks, our award-winning Crucial System Scanner or Crucial Memory Advisor™ tool will identify compatible upgrades for your system, and if you order on Crucial.com, we guarantee compatibility — or your money back. With fast and free shipping, outstanding tech support, and an exhaustive library of articles, videos, and install guides, we make it easy to find and install the right upgrade for your system.

 

Let us be your memory and storage experts.”

 

Product Features:

 

Proven Performance

When performance and reliability are critical, build your rig with our Micron Advanced NAND and PCIe® 4.0 NVMe™ technology. Our Crucial P5 Plus is nearly 2x4 faster than our previous generation and boasts read speeds up to 6600MB/s. The P5 Plus is developed, manufactured, and tested with Micron for end-to-end quality you can trust.

Get More Done

With cutting-edge technology and stability, the P5 Plus is perfect for intensive uses like gaming, video editing, content creation, and demanding engineering applications.

Interoperability

The P5 Plus offers flexibility. Whether you need an SSD for a Gen3 system upgrade or a new Gen4 build, the P5 Plus is compatible with both. Experience faster boot ups, apps that open in seconds, and games that load as soon as you're ready to play.

Fully Loaded

Combine performance and durability with the advanced features of our P5 Plus, including industry-leading NAND, innovative controller technology, adaptive thermal protection, dynamic write acceleration, error correction, and encryption capability. All Crucial SSDs also come with our Storage Executive and free cloning software.

Works with PS5™

By installing a P5 Plus with a heatsink in the empty M.2 upgrade slot, PlayStation™ 5 players can expand storage for their game library and quickly run the hottest titles directly from the drive.

 

Product Specifications:

 

SSD series - P5-Plus

Interface - NVMe (PCIe Gen 4 x4)

Capacity - 2TB

Form factor - M.2 (2280)

Sequential Read - 6600 MB/s

Sequential Write - 5000 MB/s

SSD Endurance (TBW) - 1200TB

Warranty - Limited 5-year

 

After the high-performance P5 SSD which we have tested back in 2021 from Crucial, we were wondering what will come next…the company did not stay still and jumped directly to the PCIe 4.0 bandwagon with a new controller but also 176-layer TLC NAND, manufactured by its mother company, Micron. For the 2TB model, Crucial advertises the drive with insane read/write speeds, up to 6600MB/s reads and 5000MB/s writes, an SSD endurance of 1200TBW and a limited warranty of 5 years.

 

The product is offered inside a very compact packaging model, like the one we have seen with P1, P2 and regular P5. The frontal area does show the name of the drive but also the total storage space of the SKU:

 

 

 

On the back, we will note that a Data Transfer Software is available in order to move it from the slower drive to the new one, an Installation Guide will show how to proceed but also newer firmware versions can be downloaded from the online website:

 

 

 

After unsealing the box, we did find a transparent plastic mold, which holds the drive in place along with the rest of the bundle:

 

 

 

The written Installation Guide practically informs us of the online resources which can be accessed for more info:

 

 

 

The drive is also offered with a small fixing screw, in case you lost the one which came with the motherboard (PC/laptop/PS5 console):

 

 

 

 

The top area of the drive is completely covered by a black plastic sticker, which holds the company logo and product name in the middle:

 

 

 

The back side of the drive does not contain other components, but we will find two other stickers, one of which notes the technical specs, the product code name, currently flashed firmware and more!

 

 

 

Removing the top sticker won’t void the warranty and does not contribute to additional cooling; with it out of the way, we will be able to take a closer look at the main ICs:

 

 

 

The in-house controller is also manufactured by Micron and holds the DM02A1 code name; it natively supports PCIe 4.0, TLC NAND, and comes with eight channels:

 

 

 

The 2TB version of the P5 Plus does come with 2GB of LPDDR4 cache for storing the mapping tables:

 

 

 

The two 3D TLC NAND Flash chips do come with 1TB of storage each and have 176 layers; due to its high-performance, the new IC can be successfully implemented in data centers, 5G applications, cloud, AI, intelligent edge and mobile:

 

 

 

Test Bench:

The test system did incorporate a Ryzen 5 5600X 6-core CPU, two Trident Z RGB 3200MHz 8GB memory modules with 16-18-18-38 XMP 2.0 timings, a PowerColor Red Dragon Radeon RX 5700 video card but also a Patriot Memory Viper VP4100 PCIe 4.0 SSD ; all these were connected to the BIOSTAR B550GTA motherboard. As a power supply we have chosen a Cooler Master 850W non-modular and the system was running the latest Windows 10 OS build as well.

The drive has arrived unformatted, but for testing purposes, we have formatted it NTFS:

 

 

With the help of AIDA64, we could extract more information regarding the drive:

 

 

The Tests

 

PCMark 10

Quick System Drive Benchmark

3DMark

Quick System Drive Benchmark

 

 

 

CrystalMark HDD Test Suite

 

AIDA64 Disk Test Suite

 

 

CrystalDisk Test Suite (Random)

 

HDTune Test Suite

Blank SSD

 

PCMark Vantage HDD Test Suite

 

Anvil [Read]

Anvil [Write]

 

Extra Tests:

 

AS SSD Benchmark

Blank SSD

AS SSD Benchmark (IOPS)

Blank SSD

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Blank SSD

 

To prepare for the second test stage, we have filled the drive over 50% and at the same time we have monitored the transfer speeds but also the drive temperature thanks to the S.M.A.R.T. output. P5 Plus was able to keep a high constant transfer rate for more thank 500GB, which is quite amazing:

 

 

 

 

During this test stage, the temperatures were hovering about 69-70 degrees Celsius, which is quite acceptable in a well-ventilated case:

 

 

 

After writing more than 750GB to the drive, the transfer rates started dropping to about 600-790MB/s, meaning that the SLC was almost filled up and the drive has already started writing to TLC:

 

 

 

 

During this time, the controller started working quite hard, the temperature rising to about 75 degrees Celsius:

 

 

 

In the last part of the test, the drive got under 500MB/s for quite a bit but at the same time it has recorded spikes at about 990MB/s, meaning that the controller was also struggling to free up some SLC at the same time:

 

 

 

 

After the writing has completed, the controller did hover at around 76-77 degrees Celsius until it finished transferring data to be able to free even more SLC and recover original performance.

 

The Tests

 

PCMark 10

Quick System Drive Benchmark

3DMark

Quick System Drive Benchmark

 

 

 

CrystalMark HDD Test Suite

 

AIDA64 Disk Test Suite

 

 

CrystalDisk Test Suite (Random)

 

HDTune Test Suite

Filled SSD

 

PCMark Vantage HDD Test Suite

 

Anvil [Read]

Anvil [Write]

 

Extra Tests:

 

AS SSD Benchmark

Filled SSD

AS SSD Benchmark (IOPS)

Filled SSD

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Blank SSD

 

The Crucial P5 Plus did impress us quite a bit in terms of performance and we were quite surprised that the controller remained at acceptable temperature levels even when writing continuously to the drive. You will have to expect the usual performance fluctuation when SLC gets filled up but in most usage scenario there won’t be any issues even when downloading very large games off Steam. Our tests were conducted inside a well-ventilated computer case but expect the situation to change if your enclosure does not feature active cooling or is installed inside a laptop.

 

The HD Tune Pro write workload does offer a quick look on how the speed of the drive does modify during intense usage, but in real-world scenarios when writes are not done as intensively, the P5 Plus will perform optimally:

 

 

 

While on the Crucial website the P5 Plus is listed with a price of 346.85 Euros, other stores online have the same drive listed for as low as 290 Euros. Given the drive performance and available storage space, we can say it’s a pretty good deal! The P5 Plus is also available with 500GB capacity for about 75 Euros, while the 1TB version can be purchased for about 129 Euros.

 

Crucial P5 Plus 2TB PCIe M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 Gaming SSD is Recommended for:

 

 

 

We would like to thank again to Crucial for making this review possible!