Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
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With a heatsink on top, the Crucial P310 2280 2TB has a bit more complexity with its appearances and physical layout. The drive itself may still follow a standard full-size 2280 format, but out of the box we have a notably larger item. The heatsink is clean with the Crucial branding and product name printed on top. It is black in color with grey printing, which again keeps with this clean exterior. The heatsink is also not a solid block of metal, as there is a tunnel with fins inside that goes from one end of the P310 to the other. This allows air to pass through the material and remove heat. It is not entirely clear what the heatsink is made of, but Crucial's other drives with heatsinks are made of aluminum with a nickel-plated copper core. The top chunk of metal clips into an aluminum frame on both sides and makes contact with the drive inside through a blue thermally conductive pad. Crucial does still note this is PS5 compatible, even with the heatsink on. However, you probably cannot fit this into any laptop unless you remove the heatsink. At that point, you are better off just going for the standard P310 2280. There is also the P310 2230 variant for handheld devices like the Steam Deck.
The Crucial P310 2280 2TB, as the name suggests, is an M.2 2280 format SSD. This means the drive itself is 22mm wide and 80mm long. The heatsink adds a thickness of 10mm. Its components are located on the black printed circuit board, which we will expose the layout shortly. The Crucial P310 2280 2TB utilizes the NVMe 1.4 logical devices interface and plugs directly into compatible motherboards via the M.2 header. Electrically, this interfaces with PCIe 4.0. The P310 uses four lanes for up to 8000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. The weight of the heatsink-laden Crucial P310 2280 2TB is 28g, which is quite a bit heavier but expected.
On the backside of the Crucial P310 2280 2TB, you will find no components of interest, whether looking at this aluminum shell or the PCB. The labels here denote miscellaneous information of this product's model name, capacity, serial number, and regulation certifications. Otherwise, there is nothing really necessary to look at. You can see this drive originated from Malaysia, where a lot of other Crucial drives have also come from.
Removing the heatsink of the Crucial P310 2280 2TB is a bit more tedious than pulling off a label, because of the metal clips that hold everything in place. I would not recommend doing this, especially if you purposefully obtained this drive for the use of the heatsink, as there are no easily configurable parts underneath. At the heart of the P310 2TB, we have a Phison PS5027-E27T. This is the same as the other P310 drives we have reviewed. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket that uses the PCIe 4.0 standard. According to Phison, it is built on TSMC's 12nm process with a 32-bit microcontroller. Based on the "T" in the name, you know the memory of the controller is located within the controller, and there is no extra memory chip on the SSD. This is a bit of a disadvantage to having no DRAM, as this can affect prolonged read and write performance. To alleviate this, some SSDs without DRAM may utilize HMB, or Host Memory Buffer, and allocate some of the system's memory as a buffer location for faster access compared to flash NAND access. This is the case with the Crucial P310 2280 2TB. Otherwise, the controller also supports native full drive encryption.
Nearby, there is one Micron-branded N58R 232-layer quad-level cells in one chip labeled NY325. This translates to a MT29F16T08GSLDHL8-24QM:D
To see how all this hardware translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the P310 2280 2TB against other SSDs from manufacturers like ADATA, Corsair, Crucial, Kingston, Netac, Patriot, and Western Digital in the next seven pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i5-12600K
CPU Cooling: be quiet! Light Loop 360mm
Motherboard: ASUS ProArt Z690-Creator WiFi
RAM: Crucial Pro Overclocking DDR5-6000 2x16GB
Graphics: EVGA GeForce RTX 3070 FTW3 ULTRA GAMING
Chassis: Thermaltake Core P3 TG Pro Snow
Storage: XPG Atom 30 1TB
Power: FSP Hydro PTM Pro 1200W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Crucial P310 2280 2TB (Heatsink Version)
- ADATA Legend 960 1TB
- Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB
- Corsair MP600 Elite 2TB
- Crucial P310 2230 2TB
- Crucial P310 2280 1TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 4TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 2TB (Heatsink Version)
- Crucial T500 2TB
- Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB
- Kingston KC3000 1TB
- Kingston NV3 2TB
- Lexar NM710 1TB
- Lexar PLAY 1TB
- Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 2TB
- Netac NV7000-Q 1TB
- Netac NV7000-t 1TB
- Patriot P400 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770M 2TB
- 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
