Crucial is a global brand of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the largest memory and flash storage manufacturers in the world. The company’s product lineup includes award-winning solid state drives (SSDs) and computer memory upgrades (DRAM) for more than 50,000 systems. These products have been qualified and approved by major original equipment manufacturers and every single module has been rigorously tested at the component and module level. Each SSD also undergoes over a thousand hours of prerelease validation testing and hundreds of qualification tests to ensure optimal reliability and performance.
The latest addition to Crucial’s line of NVMe solid state drives is the P5 Plus. Designed specifically for intensive workloads, high-quality creative content and hardcore gaming, this M.2 form factor drive is powered by Micron’s own DM02A1 controller and is available with up to 2TB of their industry-leading 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. The P5 Plus also includes advanced features like full dynamic write acceleration, error correction, full hardware-based encryption and adaptive thermal protection to keep your data safe while enhancing system reliability. To top it all off, the drive is equipped with an ultra-fast PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 1.4 interface and is capable of 6,600 MB/s read and 5,000 MB/s write speeds.
The P5 Plus is available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. For this review, Crucial sent us the 1TB version of the drive which is capable of delivering up to 6,600 MB/s sequential read and 5,000 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 630,000 random read and 700,000 random write IOPS.
| Crucial P5 Plus 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 Solid State Drive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
General Specifications
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Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the P5 Plus has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we’ll take a closer look at Crucial’s new PCIe 4.0 SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the P5 Plus have what it takes? Can it deliver the performance and features that we’ve come to expect from Crucial? Keep reading as we find out.
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The P5 Plus comes in a small, blue and white box. While there aren’t a lot of technical details, the packaging advertises some of the drive’s key features including its 1TB capacity, support for PCIe 4.0 NVMe technology, and 5 year warranty. The back of the box also has a small window that lets you see the drive and view the QR code on it. Inside, you’ll find the P5 Plus as well as a mounting screw and a small guide with information on where you can get additional help and download the migration and cloning software.
Physical Features:
The P5 Plus uses the 2280 form factor for M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. It measures 22 x 80 x 2.25 mm and tips the scales at less than 8g. The drive also has an “M key” edge connector which provides PCIe SSDs with up to 4x lanes of bandwidth.
The P5 Plus is one of the first drives to use Micron’s new DM02A1 controller. Not much is known about this controller aside from that it was designed in house, has eight channels and supports hardware-based encryption.
For the 1TB version of the P5 Plus, Crucial opted to use Micron’s 176-layer (B47R) 3D TLC NAND flash. If you’d remove the sticker, you’d see that there are two 512GB NAND flash packages on the top of the PCB. The drive also has a single 1GB Micron LPDDR4 DRAM chip that is used for caching.
