SSD by stefan @ 2022-11-27
As an entry-level to mainstream PCIe 4.0 SSD, the P3 Plus 2TB can offer quite a bit of sustained performance thanks to the pseudo-SLC inside of the Micron 176-layer NAND ICs. While it comes with the same main components as the PCIe 3.0 P3, there are subtle differences at the hardware level onboard but also the firmware, so flashing a P3 Plus firmware to the P3 won’t automatically transform it into a P3 Plus drive.
At first we would like to thank Crucial for sending a sample of their P3 Plus 2TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 SSD for testing and reviewing.
“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.”
Powerful Performance
Upgrade your PC with the fast Gen4 performance it needs at a price you want. The Crucial P3 Plus NVMe SSD delivers load times and data transfers that are 8.9x faster than SATA and 43% faster than the fastest Gen3 SSDs.
Spacious Storage
With generous space of up to 4TB, the Crucial P3 Plus offers powerful Gen4 storage for loads of apps, programs, files, docs, photos, videos, and games — with room to spare.
Trusted Technology
Crucial P3 Plus Gen4 NVMe SSDs are built with high-quality Micron® Advanced 3D NAND, tested and validated to the exacting standards you’ve come to expect from one of the world’s largest manufacturers of flash memory. Want proof? Go check out our award-winning line of SSDs.
Solid Security
Gen4 technology, SSD management software for performance optimization, and firmware updates give the Crucial P3 Plus Gen4 NVMe SSD everything you need for security and peace of mind.
Ongoing support
We’ve got your back! Crucial offers everything you need to get started and maintain optimal SSD performance.
One of the largest memory and storage manufacturers worldwide
Micron® has been producing some of the world's most advanced memory and storage technologies for more than 40 years. All Crucial® products are developed by Micron’s world-class engineering team to ensure best-in-class quality and reliability.
Speed: Sequential read/write speeds up to 5000/4200MB/s
Capacity: 2TB
Generation: PCIe 4.0 NVMe™ technology
Innovation: Micron Advanced 3D NAND and innovative controller technology
Warranty: 5-Year limited
Form Factor: M.2 (2280)
The next SSD which has arrived in our labs is the P3 Plus 2TB from Crucial, which shares quite a bit of hardware components from the P3. We are getting again a DRAMless solution with a Phison controller, paired with QLC NAND ICs to obtain a cost-affordable price per gigabyte, but the endurance is lower versus the TLC drives.
P3 Plus has arrived inside a very compact cardboard enclosure with the usual Crucial box art, showing a photo of the drive on the frontal area, together with the total storage space and the bus it was meant to function on:
On the back side, we will note the fact that the SSD is backed up with a data transfer software (Acronis), a written instruction guide, but the product also allows firmware updates. The product is also backed up by a limited 5-year warranty given that we do not break the mentioned TBW rating:
Inside we will note a small leaflet but also a transparent plastic enclosure:
The leaflet guides the user towards the online resources:
There is also a screw shipped with the drive, in order to help with fixing the drive onto the desired slot:
The P3 Plus SSD comes with the frontal area of the PCB completely covered by a sticker, carrying the Crucial logo, but also the product logo:
On the back side we will note a lack of extra components, but only two stickers which include the product code name, its serial number, but also its power rating:
After removing the frontal sticker, we did note four NAND ICs, a central controller, and no DRAM cache:
Each of the four Micron chips are marked 2FC2D NY161 which tells us that we are dealing with 3D QLC NAND:
In terms of the controller, we’ve got the Phison PS5021-E21-48, which incorporates an ARM 32-bit Cortex-R5 architecture with a single CPU. For caching purposes, it does use HMB (Host Memory Buffer) and this time it is enabled for PCIe 4.0 data transfers. The controller does support up to 4 channels and a flash transfer rate up to 1600MT/s:
The test system did incorporate a AMD Ryzen 5 7600X 6-core CPU, a Sabrent Rocket 2x16GB DDR5 4800MHz C40 memory kit, a PowerColor Red Dragon Radeon RX 5700 video card but also a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus NVMe 4.0 2TB SSD; all these were connected to the BIOSTAR X670E VALKYRIE AM5 motherboard. As a power supply we have chosen a Cooler Master 850W non-modular and the system was running the latest Windows 11 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:
Quick System Drive Benchmark
Blank SSD
Quick System Drive Benchmark
Blank SSD
Blank SSD
As with the P3, we do get two monitoring temperatures via AIDA64, for the NAND but also for the controller:
We started transferring data to the drive, to reach over 50% of the space occupied:
At the same time, the NAND temperature has been raised to 51 degrees Celsius, while the controller has heated up to 73:
The drive continued to offer optimal performance even after writing 70GB of data:
The temperatures continued to raise:
After 100GB of data written, we noted the first performance drop, to about 2.5GB/s:
In this moment, the NAND temperature has raised to about 59, while the controller reached 84 degrees Celsius:
The drive has stabilized the transfer rate after a short while:
The controller has reached 91 degrees at this moment in time:
After writing about 252GB of data, we noted a controller temp of about 94 degrees Celsius:
After writing about 461GB of data, the speed was still hovering around 2.8GB/s:
We started getting worried after we have seen the controller temp reaching 98 degrees Celsius:
The first speed drop was mentioned after about 509GB of data written:
At this time, we noted about 70 degrees Celsius on the NAND and 97 degrees Celsius for the controller:
After this moment, we noted a stabilization of temperatures, the controller temps never going over 96 degrees Celsius, while the NAND reached a maximum of 72 degrees:
While the File Explorer has registered multiple passes through zero till the end of the transfer test, Task Manager was telling a different story after pseudo-SLC has been filled: the drive was writing directly to the QLC with speeds between 90 and 100MB/s:
Quick System Drive Benchmark
Filled SSD
Quick System Drive Benchmark
Filled SSD
Filled SSD
Filled SSD
As an entry-level to mainstream PCIe 4.0 SSD, the P3 Plus 2TB can offer quite a bit of sustained performance thanks to the pseudo-SLC inside of the Micron 176-layer NAND ICs. While it comes with the same main components as the PCIe 3.0 P3, there are subtle differences at the hardware level onboard but also the firmware, so flashing a P3 Plus firmware to the P3 won’t automatically transform it into a P3 Plus drive. As with the P3, we noted quite high temperatures on the controller, so we would recommend using the product inside a very well-ventilated enclosure or with an extra motherboard heatsink to distribute the excess heat on a larger surface.
The HD Tune Pro write workload does show how the write speeds can fluctuate, while we have a healthy amount of SLC cache available:
In Europe, the P3 Plus 2TB can be found online for about 174.44 Euros at the time of the review, but very close regarding price we will also find the WD_Black SN770 2TB which is incorporating 3D TLC 112 Layer NAND with a higher TBW rating. Surprisingly, the winner in this case is not at 2TB capacity, but at 4TB, where the P3 Plus leads supreme at about 328,7 Euros!
We would like to thank again to Crucial for making this review possible!
