Page 10 - Conclusion
The Crucial P3 Plus 1TB is only $95 at press time, which makes it quite a bargain, considering this is a PCIe 4.0-based NVMe SSD. But was using it a good experience? I have to say I am quite impressed by what a ultra-budget SSD can do in 2022, considering how far we have come since the first SSD I have reviewed on this website, the OCZ Vertex 2 60GB, for around the same price 12 years ago. The P3 Plus 1TB is clearly highly optimized for certain tests, mainly simple synthetic ones, and in these tests, it posted even higher numbers than the company's own P5 Plus 1TB. However, the P3 Plus 1TB was near the bottom compared to other PCIe 4.0-based NVMe SSDs in real-life simulations. Now, this is not necessarily a bad place to be, because it is still better than pretty much any PCIe 3.0-based drive, meaning the performance is still very good. Of course, this comes with a major compromise, and it manifests itself in the form of write endurance. The Micron NY161 176-layer quad-level cells used in the P3 Plus 1TB have a rated write endurance of only 220TBW, which is extremely low by today's standard. This is about one-third of what we typically see. You probably will not write 120TB per day, every day, for five years, but let us consider the competition. Western Digital's WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB can be had for less than five extra dollars at the time of review, and even though the SN770 is also a DRAM-less SSD like the P3 Plus, it delivers significantly higher performance with almost three times higher write endurance. In short, the Crucial P3 Plus 1TB is not a bad solid state drive in of itself, but the company should lower the price to make it more competitive in today's market.
Crucial provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The Crucial P3 Plus 1TB NVMe SSD shows how much progress we have made in delivering high performance storage to the masses, but the price needs to be lowered to make it more attractive against the competition.
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
