Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Crucial P3 Plus 4TB is the largest capacity variant in the company's budget PCIe 4.0-based NVMe SSD lineup. I already reviewed the Crucial P3 Plus 1TB in September last year. As it is with the rest of the lineup, it comes with no heatsink from the factory. Instead, you will get a sticker, as shown in our photo above. Cooling will depend on the heatsink that comes with your motherboard, or you can pick up something like the SilverStone TP05. The Crucial P3 Plus 4TB is PlayStation 5-compatible, since the total thickness is below 11.25mm.
The Crucial P3 Plus 1TB is an M.2 2280 format SSD. If you are not familiar with the M.2 physical standard, M.2 2280 means it 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 branding sticker, which we will take a closer look at in just a moment. The Crucial P3 Plus 4TB 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 P3 Plus uses four lanes for up to 8000MB/s bandwidth in each direction.
Flipping the Crucial P3 Plus 4TB around and you will find no components of interest. The labels on this side of the Crucial P3 Plus SSD carries miscellaneous information such as its model name, capacity, serial number, and regulatory certifications. Other than that, it is completely blank as all the components are located on the other side. This SSD is assembled in Mexico, which is the same as the 1TB variant.
Peeling the sticker back, and you can see what the Crucial P3 Plus 4TB is made from. There are two different components that can be seen. At the heart of Crucial's P3 Plus 4TB is a Phison PS5021-E21. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to utilize the bandwidth afforded by the PCIe 4.0 standard. There is no native encryption support. To save cost, no DRAM is available to the controller for system memory. Just for background, SSD DRAM is used as a cache for writing data to the drive and storing a table that maps where each logical block address is physically located on the NAND flash memory. However, DRAM chips are not cheap even if you only need 1GB of DRAM per 1TB of storage, so budget SSDs often omit it to cut cost. Instead, DRAM-less SSDs store the mapping data on the NAND flash itself, which affects performance, as flash memory is orders of magnitudes slower than DRAM. To compensate, the NVMe interface supports something called the Host Memory Buffer, which allows the use of some of your computer's RAM to cache the mapping data. This is not as fast as an SSD having its own DRAM, but still much faster than the SSD's NAND flash memory.
The Crucial P3 Plus's flash memory are Micron-branded 176-layer quad-level cells in four chips labeled NY166, which translates to the part number MT29F8T08GULCEM4-QA:C. Its rated write endurance is rather low at 800TBW for a 4TB drive, which equates to about 438GB per day for five years. This is significantly lower than other budget drives relatively to its capacity like the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB and Crucial P5 Plus 1TB at 600TBW. The XPG Atom 50 1TB is rated even higher at 650TBW, and all these models have a quarter of the capacity. The Crucial P3 Plus 4TB's rated power consumption is not published. 96GB out of the 4096GB total capacity -- just under 3% -- is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 4TB, as advertised. You will see 3.63TB in Windows.
Specified at 4800MB/s read and 4100MB/s write over NVMe 1.4 on PCIe 4.0 x4, these figures are modest for a PCIe 4.0-based budget model. No IOPS ratings are available. That said, it is about one-and-a-half times 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 P3 Plus 4TB against the big boys of this game to see how this new budget PCIe 4.0-based drive from Crucial steps up against some popular NVMe SSDs from manufacturers like ADATA/XPG, Kingston, Patriot, Western Digital, and even Crucial themselves in the next seven pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-D15S chromax.black
Motherboard: ASUS TUF Gaming B550-Plus
RAM: Patriot Viper Steel RGB DDR4-3200 2x16GB
Graphics: Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 960 4GB
Chassis: NZXT H700i
Storage: Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
Power: Seasonic PRIME Ultra Titanium 850W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Crucial P3 Plus 4TB
- ADATA Legend 960 1TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB
- Kingston KC3000 1TB
- Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 2TB
- 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
