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Crucial's P310 drive was originally launched as a 2230 drive offering a fast storage upgrade for portable gaming and compute or ultra-thin devices. Now there's a new model on the market, aimed at the desktop and laptop market segments, known as the P310 2280. We test the 2TB version and find out what it can bring to the table at the £125 asking price.
The P310 combines a Phison PS5027-E27T (DRAM-less) 4-channel controller and Micron 232-layer 3D QLC NAND. The drive doesn't have any form of heatsink at present (at the time of writing) but heatsink-equipped versions of the drives are not too far away. At launch, the 2280 version of the P310 comes in three capacities; 500GB, 1TB, and the flagship 2TB, so identical to the 2230 drive range.
Crucial quote Sequential performance figures for the 2TB drive (the drive we are reviewing), as up to 7,100MB/s and 6,000MB/s for read and writes respectively. The 1TB drive has the same ratings while the 500GB makes do with up to 6,600MB/s for reads and up to 3,500MB/s for writes. Random performance is quoted as up to 1M IOPS for reads and up to 1.2M IOPS for writes for both the 1 and 2TB models with the 500GB drive rated at up to 520,000 IOPS and 890,000 IOPS for reads and writes respectively.
The endurance rating for the 2TB drive is 440 TBW which is lower than what you may be used to seeing for a 2TB Gen 4 drive but that's down to the limitations of QLC NAND. Crucial backs the drive with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 2TB.
- NAND Components: 232-layer 3D QLC NAND.
- NAND Controller:Phison PS5027-E27T.
- Cache: None – DRAM less.
- Interface: PCIe x4, NVMe 1.4.
- Form Factor: M.2 2280,
- Dimensions: 80 x 22 x 2.3mm
- Drive Weight: 6g.
Firmware Version: V8CR000.
The P310 comes in a slim-line box with a clear image of the drive on the front. To the right of this image is a sticker that displays the drive's capacity, maximum Sequential read speed (7,100MB/s) and a logo stating the 5-year warranty. The rear of the box is home to some multi-lingual notes about the drive's speed and backward compatibility.
Crucial's 2TB P310 is built on a single-sided M.2 2280 format.
Under the product label sits the controller and a single NAND package. Phison's PS5027-E27T is a 4-channel DRAM-less design controller built on a 12nm TSMC process. It uses single-CPU architecture (built-in ARM 32-bit Cortex-R5) and supports up to 8TB of both TLC or QLC NAND (Toggle 5.0 and ONFi 5.0 compliant) with transfer rates of up to 3600MT/s. Data reliability is provided by Phison's 5th generation LDPC ECC along with End-To-End Data Path Protection. It also supports AES 256-bit Encryption although this is not enabled on the P310. The NAND used for the P310 is Micron's own 232-layer N58R 3D QLC NAND running at 2,400MT/s.
With just two chips on the PCB, there is a lot of free real estate should Crucial fancy the idea of producing bigger capacity drives.
Crucial’s Storage Executive is a pretty comprehensive SSD toolkit. With it, you can check the drive’s S.M.A.R.T data, update the firmware, see how the drive’s capacity is being used, monitor the drive’s operating temperature and overall health as well as adjust the Over Provisioning. There are a few more options as well that aren't supported by this particular drive. There isn't a disc cloning tool built into the Storage Executive but Acronis True Image for Crucial can be downloaded from Crucial's website.
The drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings for testing by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real-world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, 16GB DDR4-2400, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge Wifi motherboard
Other drives
Corsair MP600 GS 2TB
Corsair MP600 PRO 2TB
Corsair MP600 PRO XT 2TB
Crucial T500 2TB
Gigabyte AORUS 7000e 2TB
HP FX900 Pro 2TB
Kingston Fury Renegade Heatsink 2TB
Kingston KC3000 2TB
Kioxia Exceria Plus 2TB
Kioxia Exceria Pro 2TB
Lexar NM790 4TB
Lexar NM790 with Heatsink 4TB
Lexar Professional NM800PRO Heatsink 2TB
MSI Spatium M480 2TB
Netac NV7000-t 2TB
Patriot Viper VP4300 2TB
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 4TB
Samsung SSD990 PRO 2TB
Solidigm P41 Plus 2TB
Seagate Lightsaber Collection Special Edition FireCuda 2TB
Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB
WD Black SN850X Heatsink 2TB
WD_Black SN770M 2TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark 4.
CrystalMark 7.0.0.
AS SSD 2.0.
IOMeter.
Futuremark PC Mark 10.
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure the theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using v8.0.5.
Using CrystalDiskMark 8's 4K QD1 T1 test the P310 produced a read score of 82.75MB/s which puts it just inside the top 10 of drives we tested with this benchmark to date. Its write result of 255.29MB/s is pretty good too.
As you can see from the benchmark result screens the drive confirmed the official maximum Sequential figures of 7,100MB/s and 6,000MB/s for read and writes respectively with a default read test result of 7,206MB/s and a write test result that is some 300MB/s faster than the official figure.
That Sequential read result sees the drive in the bottom half of the results chart just behind Crucial's T500 drive although the T500 has a much faster write performance.
Peak Performance Profile
Using the Peak Performance profile of the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we couldn't hit the official maximum random read / write figures of 1M IOPS and 1.2M IOPS respectively with best default test result figures of 785,164 IOPS for reads and 623,109 IOPS for writes.
Using the Peak Performance profile of the CrystalDiskMark benchmark we were once again able to confirm maximum official Sequential performance figures.
Real World Profile
Using CrystalDiskMark 8's Real World profile, the 2TB P310 2280 drive produced read and write scores of 3,999MB/s and 5,509MB/s, which puts the drive in the middle of the results chart.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage system performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
We are using version 4.0 for our NVMe disk tests.
Using the ATTO benchmark, we couldn't hit the official maximum read figure of 7,100MB/s with a test result of 6,840MB/s but at 6,270MB/s, the write result betters the official 6,000MB/s.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read-and-write tests and random read-and-write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. It uses incompressible data samples which many drives struggle with, so results can be viewed as the worst-case scenario.
AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
The AS SSD read score of 3072 sees Crucial's P310 2280 drive in sixth place in the results chart but at 3029 its write performance is also pretty strong.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the Sequential read and write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
128KB Sequential Read / Write.
Transfer Request Size: 128KB, Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
In this test, we can confirm the official maximum Sequential read of 7,100MB/s with a test result of 7,174MB/s. When it came to write performance the drive did a little better, producing a peak figure of 6,321MB/s (QD8), 321MB/s faster than the official maximum before dropping back a little to finish the test run at 6,317MB/s (QD32).
128KB Sequential Read performance compared.
The drive sits in the bottom half of the read result chart through all the tested queue depths. Compared to the drives around it, the best performance seems to come at QD4.
128KB Sequential Write performance compared.
As with the Sequential read results the write performance sees the drive in the bottom half of the table with the best performance coming at QD1.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the 4K random read performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
With our 4-threaded random 4K read testing we couldn't get close to the official rating of 1,00,000 IOPS with a best test result of 374,849 IOPS at QD16.
4K Random Read v QD compared.
At QD1, 2 and 4 the 2TB Crucial P310 sits in a mid-table position, however, by QD32 it has dropped down the chart.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the 4K random write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB, Outstanding I/O: 1-32
As with our 4-threaded random 4K read testing, we couldn't get close to the official rating of 1,200,000 IOPS in our random write tests. The best we saw was 245,619 IOPS (1,006MB/s) at QD32.
4K Random Write v QD compared
Compared to the drives around it the Crucial P310 2280 performs best at QD1 where it sits in a mid-table position. After this, it drops down the table ending up in last place at QD's 4 and 32.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8’s custom settings to test the 4K 70/30 mixed read/write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths using a single thread and four threads.
In the 4K 70/30 read/write test the drive produced a best test result of 348,359 IOPS (1,428.88MB/s) at QD16 using four threads. Switching to single thread testing the drive peaked at 116,853 IOPS (477.81MB/s) at QD32.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8 to test the random performance of the drive at lower queue depths (QD1 – QD8 where most of the everyday workloads occur) using 1 to 4 threads.
Random Reads
Crucial's P310 2280 displays smooth acceleration as it moves from QD1 to QD8 in each of the four threads used for testing. With a single thread, the performance ranges from 19,700 IOPS (80.69MB/s) at QD1 up to 122,790 IOPS (502.94MB/s) at QD8. Using four threads the performance ranges from 76,982 IOPS (315.31MB/s) at QD1 up to 351,123 IOPS (1,438MB/s) at QD8.
Random Writes
Switching over to random writes, in all four threads the performance rose quickly from QD1 to QD2 with the fastest rise seen in the three and four threaded tests. After QD2 all four threads see the performance begin to plateau out.
In our read-throughput test, the drive peaked at the 16MB block mark at 5,332.8MB/s, well short of the official maximum figure of 7,100MB/s.
The peak read figure of 5,332.81MB/s sees the Crucial P310 2280 sitting in the bottom half of the results chart.
In the write throughput tests, the drive peaked at the 4MB mark at 5,854MB/s before the drive finished the test run at 5,720MB/s. Both figures are short of the official maximum of 6,000MB/s but much closer to it than the read performance of the drive.
As with the read result, the drive sits in the bottom half of the table.
The PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The benchmark is designed to measure performance of fast system drives using the SATA bus at the low end and devices connected via PCI Express at the high end.
The goal of the benchmark is to show meaningful real-world performance differences between fast storage technologies such as SATA, NVMe, and Intel’s Optane. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses 23 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes an hour to run.
Traces used:
Booting Windows 10.
Adobe Acrobat – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Illustrator – starting the application until usable Adobe Premiere Pro – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Photoshop – starting the application until usable.
Battlefield V – starting the game until the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4 – starting the game until the main menu.
Overwatch – starting the game until main menu.
Using Adobe After Effects.
Using Microsoft Excel.
Using Adobe Illustrator.
Using Adobe InDesign.
Using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Using Adobe Photoshop (heavy use).
Using Adobe Photoshop (light use).
cp1 Copying 4 ISO image files, 20 GB in total, from a secondary drive to the target drive (write test).
cp2 Making a copy of the ISO files (read-write test).
cp3 Copying the ISO to a secondary drive (read test).
cps1Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, to the target drive (write test).
cps2 Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
cps3 Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).
Crucial's P310 2280 handles the PCMark10's Full System Drive Benchmark without any problems and does a decent job of it. It averaged 281MB/s for the six Adobe startup traces, the fastest being 353MB/s for the startup trace of Premiere Pro. For the Adobe usage traces it averaged 533MB/s for the five tests, with the fastest being the 1,117MB/s for the Adobe Photoshop heavy usage trace. At 601MB/s it also does a good job with the Adobe After Effects test trace.
The drive averaged 830MB/s for the three gaming tests, the fastest being the Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 trace at 1,004MB/s. When it came to the file transfers set of tests, the fastest was the cp1 Write test at 4,220MB/s with the drive averaging 2,4199MB/s for the six file transfer tests.
With an overall bandwidth figure of 579.66MB/s, the 2TB Crucial P310 2280 slots into the fourth spot on the results chart, just 20MB/s behind the leader, Crucial's T500 drive.
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark uses traces recorded from popular games and gaming-related activities to measure real-world gaming performance.
Traces used:
Battlefield V
Loading Battlefield™ V from launch to the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4
Loading Call of Duty®: Black Ops 4 from launch to the main menu.
Overwatch
Loading Overwatch® from launch to the main menu.
Game Move
Copying the Steam folder for Counter-Strike®: Global Offensive from an external SSD to the system drive.
Game Recording
Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch®.
Installing Game
Installing The Outer Worlds® from the Epic Games Launcher.
Game Saving
Saving progress in The Outer Worlds game.
The drive handles the 3DMark Storage Benchmark really quite well. It has an average bandwidth of 873.03MB/s in the Game Loading test (Battlefield V, Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Overwatch) which is good enough to see it in seventh place on the results chart.
In the game moving, recording, installing and saving test traces the drive averaged 1,053MB/s with an average access time of 33µs for the four tests, good enough for the third spot on the results chart.
The average bandwidth figure for the drive was 642.70MB/s, good enough to place the drive in the top five of 2TB Gen 4 drives we've tested to date with this test.
The Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark uses actual maps and playable characters to assign a score to your PC and rate its performance including scene loading times.
The benchmark gives an overall load time as well as loading times by scene.
The drive handles the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark quite well. It may not top any of the result charts but it still sits in a mid-table position.
We took note of the drive’s temperature during some of our benchmarking runs.
Crucial's P310 2280 drive doesn't come with a heatsink (versions fitted with a heatsink aren't too far away) but it performs well enough without one. The hottest the drive got was during a CrystalDiskMark 8 test run (Sequential QD1 – 32 T1 Write) which is a hard-hitting test when it reached 61° C. It averaged 44° for the non-4K-based tests.
For the 4K-based tests, the drive averaged 41.5° C.
To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 2TB Kingston KC3000.
Transfer Details
- Windows 10 backup – 118GB.
- Data file – 100GB.
- BluRay Movie – 42GB.
- Windows 11 iso – 5.4GB.
- File folder – 50GB – 28,523 files.
- Steam folder – 222GB (8 games: Alien Isolation, Battlefield 4, BioShock Infinite, Crysis 3, Grand Theft Auto V, Shadow Of Mordor, Skyrim, The Witcher3 Wild Hunt).
- Movie demos 8K – 21GB – (11 demos).
- Raw Movie Clips 4K – 16GB – (9 MP4V files).
- Movie folder – 12GB – 15 files – (8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4).
- Photo Folder – 10GB – 304 files – (171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG).
- Audio Folder – 10GB – 1,483 files – (1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files).
- Single large image – 5GB – 1.5bn pixel photo.
- 3D Printer File Folder – 4.25GB – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
- AutoCAD File Folder – 1.5GB (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).
In our real-life file transfer tests the drive averaged 1,660MB/s when writing the 14 transfer tests with the fastest being the 3,387MB/s for the Win 11 iso transfer which it did in just two seconds. Reading the data back it averaged 2,161MB/s, this time the 8K Movie Scene folder was the fastest at 2,978MB/s (7 secs transfer).
Crucial originally launched the P310 a few months ago as a fast M.2 2230 drive for the handheld and ultra-thin device market sectors, but now we get a 2280 version more suited for desktop PCs and laptops.
Using a combination of a Phison controller and Micron's own NAND, the 2280 version comes in three capacities; 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. The range is only available as plain drives (at the time of writing) but factory heatsink-equipped versions aren't too far behind.
At the heart of the P310 is a Phison PS5027-E27T controller. The PS5027-E27T is a 4-channel DRAM-less design built on a 12nm TSMC process with single-CPU architecture (built-in ARM 32-bit Cortex-R5). It supports up to 8TB of both TLC or QLC NAND (Toggle 5.0 and ONFi 5.0 compliant) with transfer rates of up to 3,600MT/s resulting in Sequential read/write speeds of up to 7,400MB/s and 6,700MB/s respectively. Data reliability is provided by Phison's 5th-generation LDPC ECC engine. For the P310 the controller supports a single package of Micron 232-layer N58R 3D QLC NAND running at 2,400MT/s.
Crucial rates the Sequential performance for the 2TB P301 as up to 7,100MB/s for reads and up to 6,000MB/s for writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't quite hit that maximum read figure with a test result of 6.840MB/s but for writes the tested drive managed to squeeze out a little more performance with a result figure of 6.270MB/s. Switching over to the CrystalDiskMark 8 (default) benchmark we could confirm the 7,100MB/s official read figure with a test result of 7,206MB/s (writes at 6,300MB/s).
Random performance for the drive is quoted as up to 1,000,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,200,000 IOPS for writes. We couldn't get to those figures with our testing, The fastest figures we saw came from using the Peak Performance Profile in CrystalDiskMark 8 with a best-read result of 785,165 IOPS (default-test) with a best write figure of 633,864 IOPS (0 fill test).
While stocks last Crucial is offering a one-month complimentary Adobe Creative Cloud personal All Apps plan when you purchase and register a Crucial P301 2280. The P310 is also supported by Crucial’s Storage Executive utility. It might not have the funky GUI of some of its competitors' utilities, but what it lacks in looks it more than makes up in the support and tools that it offers.
We found the 2TB Crucial P310 2280 for £124.99 from Scan HERE.
Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.
Pros
- Overall performance.
- 5-year warranty,
Cons
- Endurance is on the low side due to the QLC NAND.
- Write speeds in some benchmark tests.
- Lack of hardware encryption.
KitGuru says: As an M.2 2230 drive, Crucial's P310 is pretty much king of the hill, but in its 2280 form it has more competition both in terms of performance and pricing. That said, Crucial has given it every chance with a pretty competitive price tag.
