Crucial P3 4TB M.2 PCIe Gen3 NVMe Internal SSD - Up to 3500MB/s - CT4000P3SSD8

Product Information

Although not advertised as a PS5 SSD, I also decided to see what the Crucial P3 Plus 4TB could do when hooked up to Sony's latest system. Coming in at just under the recommended minimum benchmarks for what the hardware manufacturer advises, the drive was recognized by my console and worked flawlessly in every game and file transfer test I threw at it. MSRP pricing on the P3 isn’t particularly compelling except maybe at 4TB. However, the drive has already been on sale for a steep discount at multiple capacities including that one. Crucial clearly intends for it to be a budget drive that you can impulse buy, whether for a cheap upgrade or for storage extension. This includes for laptop use as a drive like this is bound to be efficient, particularly in comparison to older PCIe 3.0 options. Software and Accessories for Crucial P3 SSD This internal SSD hard drive offers stable transfer speeds. It's available at an attractive price, particularly for its 4 TB capacity. This makes it an interesting choice, with plenty of storage space at a competitive cost per gigabyte. It is not suitable for extremely demanding tasks, due to its limited throughput on PCI-E 3.0 and relatively modest write endurance. 3D TLC Technology vs V-NAND Typical I/O performance numbers as measured using CrystalDiskMark® withcommand queue full andwrite cache enabled. Fresh out-of-box (FOB) state is assumed. For performance measurement purposes, the SSD may be restored to FOB state using the secure erase command. System variations will affect measured results. This is impressive, is anyone else achieving QLC on charge trap NAND yet? 220 cycles is respectable for a first attempt.

MT/s is sufficient to saturate PCIe 3.0 with a four-channel controller, though, as was originally made clear with the SK hynix Gold P31. This allowed the drive to be unusually efficient when paired with new flash. The best mid-range 4.0 drives tend to be 1600 MT/s with even newer flash, which includes the P3 Plus. They are all efficient and more than powerful enough. So what does this mean for the P3? The P3 Plus will write faster in smaller bursts but given enough time the P3 will write just as much. This is no mystery as the two drives use the same hardware and the same pSLC caching scheme. The Crucial P3 speeds of up to 3500/3000MB/s are 1.3x and 1.6x faster (respectively) than Crucial P2 speeds of up to 2400/1900MB/s. Crucial wisely went with a 5-year warranty, although the TBW leaves something to be desired. It varies from 200-220TB of writes per TB of capacity, which is on the low side. This isn’t surprising for a DRAM-less QLC drive and you likely won’t exceed it within the warranty period. That being said, it is still about half that of the older P2. We suspect the actual endurance is far higher but Crucial wants to segment its drives carefully. It’s a fair point because you shouldn’t be doing a ton of writes on a drive like this. It’s difficult to talk about the P3 without discussing the P3 Plus, and vice-versa. We will suffice it to say that the P3 can’t reach the same heights as the P3 Plus, but it comes in a bit cheaper and will be more efficient in some cases. Against its PCIe 3.0 rivals, the P3 offers “good enough” performance that is bound to make it a popular budget choice. At higher capacities it may be challenging to call it “budget” in absolute dollar terms, but there it makes for an excellent secondary drive. You may want to jump up to the P3 Plus if you need the burst performance or perhaps for use in a PS5, although Crucial does not market it for the console.SSD speed comparison between published Crucial P3 NVMe SSD read/write speeds up to 3500/3000MB/s and published Crucial MX500 SATA SSD read/write speeds of 560/510MB/s; SSD vs. HDD speed comparisons between published Crucial P3 NVMe SSD read/write speeds of up to 3500/3000MB/s and top preset consumer hard disk drive read/write speeds of 7200RPM (~156MB/s). The P3, like the P3 Plus, is capable of using all of its native QLC in a single-bit pSLC mode. This allows for a cache up to about 550GB. Once it runs out of cache the P3 is forced to free up space by copying data from pSLC to QLC which slows it down greatly; the write speed plummets from 3.2 GBps to 100 MBps. The cache’s size will vary relative to the amount of free space on the drive, with a minimum amount always available to at least cache random writes.

It is important to put these results into perspective. A large file copy is probably a realistic workload for this type of drive. However, that does not reflect its worst-case condition, such as when the drive is fuller and must juggle garbage collection with host I/O. It also doesn’t account for workloads that might have more varied I/O patterns. Its power efficiency is still impressive, though, and it creates a bit of a quandary when deciding whether or not to jump up to the P3 Plus.The P3 is still DRAM-less and reliant on QLC which is quite slow when caught outside of pSLC. This is more likely when the drive is fuller or with extended workloads. Endurance is also lower, although rarely a factor. In general use it should be just fine, even at 500GB, although we still think it’s best at capacity and preferably as a secondary drive. Crucial has a budget winner on their hands with the right sales pricing, but don’t expect it to keep up with high-end drives. This type of drive is not really intended for sustained writes and it’s also true that most reads will probably come from the QLC portion of the drive. You should adjust your expectations accordingly, as you might be tempted to dump TBs on this all at once from faster drives. This cache will not falter if you’re copying from HDDs and SATA SSDs.

This is the speed you’ll see if you write too much data continuously to the P3. It does take a lot of data to accomplish this drop though. The Phison E21T controller is the same one found on the P3 Plus. Or is it? While the P3 Plus has a PCIe 4.0 interface the P3 is relegated to 3.0. This distinction is somewhat similar to that between the Phison E19T and E15T controllers, 4.0 and 3.0 respectively, but the E19T is a 28nm part with only a 1200 MT/s bus. Controllers in a smaller process node are often more efficient, more powerful, or both, and the faster 1600 MT/s bus on the 12nm E21T allows it to hit higher speeds with more bandwidth. This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best SSDs. Go there for information on competing products and how we tested them. Design, features, and price Some of the storage capacity is used for formatting and other purposes and is not available for data storage. 1GB equals 1 billion bytes. Not all capacities available at initial launch.This is also reflected in our AnvilPro test scores, too, with an overall figure of 18,961.54 taking into account its sequential and random performance on the whole. This is directly in the middle of where we find some other DRAM-less NVMe drives, such as the Patriot Viper VPR400 with its InnoGrit IG5220 controller. You won't be scrapping that 7000 MB/s Gen 4.0 cap here, but for gaming and file transfers, you could do far worse.