Crucial P5 Plus 1TB SSD Review

While PCIe 4.0 SSDs have been around for over two years at this point, Crucial has been biding its time and has now joined the party with the P5 Plus.

The drive uses Micron's latest NAND, the world's first 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. The B47R NAND uses Micron's 2nd generation Floating Gate technology and the company has stated that the new NAND offers 35% faster read and write times over 96-layer NAND, and a 25% improvement over 128-layer. The drive also uses a Micron controller, the DM02A1, details of which are very scarce.

The official maximum Sequential read/write performance figures for the 1TB Crucial P5 Plus are up to 6,600MB/s and 5,000MB/s respectively. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn’t quite hit either of these figures, but we could confirm both with the CrystalDiskMark benchmark. The best-tested read figure we saw was 6,853.07MB/s using CrystalDiskMark 8 (NVMe settings, default profile). The best write figure was 5,021.18MB/s using the Peak Performance profile (0 fill).

Officially the 1TB Crucial P5 Plus is rated at up to 630,000 IOPS for random reads and up to 700,000 IOPS for random writes. Using our 4-threaded 4K tests we couldn’t get close to these official maximums, the best figures we saw was 357,772 IOPS and 271,545 IOPS for read / writes respectively. Using the Peak Performance profile of the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark the fastest speeds we saw were 622,561.22 IOPS for reads and 497,361.08 IOPS, still short of those official maximums.

Crucial has kept the cost of the P5 Plus down by not giving the drive any form of physical heatsink. But as with all Gen 4 drives, it runs hot when pushed hard and although it does have adaptive thermal protection, to prevent any thermal throttling it does need either a third party cooler or use it with dedicated motherboard cooling technology.

We found the 1TB Crucial P5 Plus on Amazon UK for £157.19 (inc VAT) HERE.

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Pros

• 176-layer NAND technology.
• Management software.
• 5-year warranty.

Cons

• Performance at deeper queue depths.
• Couldn’t match the official random write figures under testing.
• Needs a PCIe 4.0 supporting motherboard for best performance.

KitGuru says: It's taken quite a while but Crucial now has a Gen 4 SSD in their stable of drives. Not only that but it uses Micron's latest 176-layer NAND. It may not be the fastest Gen 4 drive around but Crucial have given it a fighting chance with a pretty competitive price tag.

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