Today we are taking a look at the Crucial P5 1TB PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD. This review completes a recent set of four 1TB PCIe 3.0 SSD reviews, consisting of the WD Blue SN550, the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, the SK hynix Gold P31, and now the Crucial P5. Like the previous drives we have looked at, this is a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe drive with onboard DRAM cache and TLC NAND, so we will see how it stacks up.
Crucial P5 1TB
The Crucial P5 1TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.
Beneath the label on the front of the drive are all of the major components. The Crucial P5 1TB is based on an in-house Micron controller. Also included is an LPDDR4 DRAM package and two NAND packages. 1024GB of NAND is present onboard, leaving a small 24GB area reserved by the controller. This small spare area is very typical among consumer-class SSD implementations. We typically see larger reserved areas on data center SSDs and even NAS SSDs such as the Synology SAT5200-960G we reviewed.
As a single-sided drive, the back has a product information label, and nothing else. As a consumer drive, there is no power loss protection (PLP.) You can read a bit more about why PLP is important in some server workloads in our piece What is the ZFS ZIL SLOG and what makes a good one.
Crucial P5 Specs
The Crucial P5 line of TLC based SSDs is available in capacities from 250GB up to 2TB.
Editor’s note: These are the official specs from the Crucial/ Micron product flyer. We however suggest that 600 “Total Bytes Written” is most likely Terabytes Written since having a 1 Terabyte drive that you can only write 600 Bytes on seems incomprehensible.
Editor’s update 2020-10-18: Micron confirmed to us that this should be Terabytes written not “Total Bytes Written”
The rated performance for all drives is the same except for the smallest capacity 250GB unit, so our 1TB review model should perform well. A 600TBW endurance is common among drives in this class and is the same as with the WD Blue SN550. The ADATA SX8200 Pro has slightly higher endurance at 640TBW, while the SK hynix Gold P31 is rated at 750TBW. As has become standard in this segment, the drive is also backed by a five-year warranty.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD, and confirms we are operating at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.3.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-P
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (6C/12T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the Crucial P5 1TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.
Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.
So, balanced read/write performance, tolerates a wide variety of data sizes, and doesn’t degrade with multiple threads. Sounds like the controller was being built for general server use. If a similar drive were built with higher endurance and power protection, how would it fare in that arena?