Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
As with most NVMe drives nowadays, the Crucial P5 500GB is small and thin. From a visual standpoint, M.2 drives are unlike traditional 2.5" drives as they have no enclosure and are installed directly onto a motherboard. More specifically, the P5 500GB is an M.2 2280 SSD, which refers to a physical standard of 22mm by 80mm. The components are located on the black printed circuit board and they are all underneath a large black sticker. The Crucial P5 500GB works on the NVMe 1.3 logical device interface and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, the M.2 NVMe interfaces with PCIe 3.0. It uses up to four lanes for a theoretical maximum of 4000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. The mass is approximately 9g for the P5 500GB.
On the back of the Crucial P5 500GB, we have yet another black label on the back. However, this time around it tells us a bit more information, including the model name, capacity, and serial number, as well as some miscellaneous information. There are no actual components on the back however. Otherwise, the label shows this drive was made in Malaysia.
Underneath the blue and white label of the Crucial P2 500GB, we are exposed to several components. There are three main components to take note of. The first is the large Micron DM01B2. This controller operates with a DRAM chip external to the controller, as you will see soon enough. Not a lot is known about this controller, but we do know this is an eight-channel flash controller that supports pseudo SLC caching and TLC memory. We will see how it performs later in our review.
Next, we have a DRAM chip that is another Micron chip with an FBGA code of D9ZCM. This refers to Micron's MT53D512M16D1DS-046 IT, which is an LPDDR4 DRAM module. It has a capacity of 8Gb or 1GB. This is surprisingly more than the typical 1GB RAM to 1TB capacity that we have seen on other NVMe drives that have onboard memory. Next, we have two black chips marked "NW972". This FBGA code refers to Micron’s MT29F2T08EQHBFG8-R:B, which is a 96-layer triple-level cell flash NAND memory module. The two chips mean each one has a capacity of 256GB. The total rated write endurance for the 500GB variant is 300TB, which compares favorably to the Crucial P2 500GB and other budget drives. It also matches flagship drives like the Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD when comparing the same capacities. The total write endurance equates to 164GB written per day for five years. In the Windows operating system, you will see 465.8GB available for use after formatting.
Specified at 3400MB/s read and 3000MB/s write over NVMe 1.3 on PCIe 3.0 x4, these figures are all in the flagship range of drives. To see how it translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit this middle of the ground SSD against other PCI Express based SSDs from popular manufacturers like ADATA, Crucial, Gigabyte, Kingston, Patriot, and Western Digital in the next nine pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-L9i chromax.black
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z170N-Gaming 5
RAM: Patriot Viper 4 Blackout DDR4-3600 2x8GB
Graphics: Integrated
Chassis: NZXT H210i
Storage: Gigabyte UD PRO 256GB
Power: FSP Dagger Pro 650W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Crucial P5 500GB
- ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB
- Crucial P1 1TB
- Crucial P1 500GB
- Crucial P2 500GB
- Gigabyte AORUS RGB AIC NVMe SSD 512GB
- Gigabyte M.2 PCIe SSD 256GB
- Kingston HyperX Predator PCIe 480GB
- Kingston KC2500 1TB
- OCZ RD400A 512GB
- OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB
- Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB
- Patriot P300 512GB
- Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB
- Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB
- Toshiba RC100 240GB
- Western Digital Black NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Blue SN500 NVMe SSD 500GB
- Western Digital Blue SN550 NVMe SSD 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 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
