Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Crucial P5 Plus 2TB is the largest capacity variant in the company's budget mainstream PCIe 4.0-based NVMe SSD lineup. We are quite familiar with the P5 Plus, since in September 2021, I reviewed the P5 Plus 1TB with a sticker, which has no heat transfer capabilities. Actual cooling depended on the heatsink that comes with your motherboard to prevent thermal throttling, but the one we are reviewing today comes with a beefy ventilated aluminum heatsink, shown in our photo above. As beefy as it is, it is still PlayStation 5-compatible, since the drive and heatsink is below 11.25mm. Otherwise, it is electrically the exact same drive under the hood.
The Crucial P5 Plus 2TB is an M.2 2280 format SSD. If you are not familiar with the M.2 physical standard, M.2 2280 means the size of the drive is 22mm by 80mm, hence its numerical designation. Its components are located on the black printed circuit board located behind the heatsink, which we will take a closer look at in just a moment. The Crucial P5 Plus 2TB works on the NVMe 1.4 logical device interface and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, M.2 NVMe interfaces with PCIe 4.0. The P5 Plus uses four lanes for up to 8000MB/s bandwidth in each direction.
Flipping the Crucial P5 Plus 2TB around and you will see the back of the wraparound heatsink. The labels on this side of the Crucial P5 Plus SSD carry miscellaneous information such as its model name, capacity, serial number, and regulatory certifications. This SSD is assembled in Malaysia, which is not same as the 1TB variant I reviewed, which was assembled in Mexico.
You can see what the Crucial P5 Plus 2TB is made from after removing the heatsink. There are three different components that can be seen, all located on the same side. At the heart of Crucial's P5 Plus 2TB is a custom controller labeled Micron DM02A1. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to utilize the bandwidth afforded by the PCIe 4.0 standard. The controller also has native full drive encryption support. A Micron D0ZRQ, decoded as MT53E1G16D1FW-046, LPDDR4-2133 2GB memory chip is present. It is used by the controller for system memory.
The Crucial P5 Plus's flash memory are Micron-branded B47R 176-layer triple-level cells in two chips labeled NY122, which translates to the part number MT29F8T08ESLEEG4-QB:E. Its rated write endurance is an excellent 1200TBW, which equates to about 660GB per day for five years. On a per-gigabyte level, it is the same as other budget drives like the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB and Crucial P5 Plus 1TB at 600TBW. The Crucial P5 Plus 2TB's rated power consumption is not published. 96GB out of the 2048GB total capacity -- just under 3% -- is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 2TB, as advertised. You will see 1.81TB in Windows.
Specified at 6600MB/s read, 5000MB/s write, up to 720,000 IOPS read, and up to 700,000 IOPS write over NVMe 1.4 on PCIe 4.0 x4, these figures are impressive for a budget mainstream model. It is about one-and-a-half to twice as fast as previous generation PCIe 3.0-based drives. To see how all this hardware translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the P5 Plus 2TB against the big boys of this game to see how this budget mainstream PCIe 4.0-based drive from Crucial steps up against some popular NVMe SSDs from manufacturers like ADATA/XPG, Corsair, Kingston, Lexar, Patriot, Western Digital, and even Crucial themselves in the next seven pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i7-12700K
Motherboard: ASUS ProArt B660-Creator D4
RAM: Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3600 4x32GB
Graphics: ASUS Dual GeForce GTX 1060 3GB
Chassis: NZXT H710i
Storage: Kingston KC3000 1TB, Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB
Power: Seasonic PRIME Ultra Titanium 850W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Crucial P5 Plus 2TB
- ADATA Legend 960 1TB
- Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 4TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB
- Kingston KC3000 1TB
- Lexar NM710 1TB
- Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 2TB
- Netac NV7000-t 1TB
- Patriot P400 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB
- XPG Atom 50 1TB
- XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
