Page 11 - Conclusion
As I have explained in the introduction, an increase in price is completely acceptable if you are purchasing a better product or service, but it should be justifiable. As with the Crucial P5 500GB, we do have some notable justifications to why this drive can demand a higher price. On one hand, we have a competitive five-year warranty and 300TB write endurance, which is on pace with other flagship-tier NVMe SSDs. With Crucial also developing their own controller in house, I am impressed to see what Micron has provided us today. We also have onboard DRAM to further boost its benchmark numbers. On the other hand, our results from our benchmark battery were a bit murkier in explaining the price increase. While we do have strong speeds in general, they do not always compare well with other options, as its linear speeds were underwhelming at times. There were redeeming points in medium-load and real-world-like tests, which at least goes to show it can compete in different circumstances. In our long and arduous PCMark 8 Storage Consistency test, the Crucial P5 500GB was quite capable of taking on stronger options. At press time, the Crucial P5 500GB retails for around $80 USD, which currently puts it at a price higher than some performance drives like the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro. This is Crucial's first foray into the higher-tier of NVMe storage, which shows they have the desire to trade blows in this market. However, this is still a very crowded market and the P5 500GB would benefit from a firmware update to increase performance or price reduction to wage war with the opposition.
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 P5 500GB is a capable first entry for Crucial in the performance NVMe SSD tier, but further speed improvements should be considered to give this drive a fighting chance in a tight market.
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 6.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
9. Benchmark: PCMark 7
10. Benchmark: PCMark 8
11. Conclusion
