Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Crucial P5 Plus 1TB 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 a SilverStone TP04. The Crucial P5 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 P5 Plus 1TB 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 P5 Plus uses four lanes for up to 8000MB/s bandwidth in each direction.
Peeling the sticker back, and you can see what the Crucial P5 Plus 1TB is made from. There are three different components that can be seen. At the heart of Crucial's P5 Plus 1TB is a custom controller. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to utilize the bandwidth afforded by the PCIe 4.0 standard. The controller also has native full drive encryption support. A Micron D8BMZ, decoded as MT53B512M16D1NP-046, LPDDR4-2133 1GB memory chip is present; it is used by the controller for system memory. The Crucial P5 Plus's flash memory are Micron-branded 176-layer triple-level cells in two chips labeled NY124. Its rated write endurance is an excellent 600TBW, which equates to about 330GB per day for five years. This is the same as the WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB, which is very good, but not anywhere close to the Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB at 1300TBW. Its rated power consumption was not given. 24GB out of the 1024GB total capacity -- just under 3% -- is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 1TB, as advertised. You will see 931GB in Windows.
Flipping the Crucial P5 Plus 1TB around and you will find no components of interest. The labels on this side of the Crucial P5 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 made in Singapore, which is something I have not seen in a very long time.
Specified at 6600MB/s read, 5000MB/s write, up to 630,000 IOPS read, and up to 700,000 IOPS write over NVMe 1.4 on PCIe 4.0 x4, these figures are impressive for a budget model. It is one-and-a-half to twice as fast as most PCIe 3.0-based drives. For comparison, the company's PCIe 3.0 x4 equivalent, the Crucial P5 we reviewed a couple of years ago, was rated at only 3400MB/s read and 3000MB/s write. Meanwhile, the PCIe 3.0 x8-based AN1500 2TB add-in card featuring multiple WD_BLACK SSDs in RAID 0 can only hit 6500MB/s read and 4100MB/s write.
To see how all this hardware translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the P5 Plus 1TB 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-based SSDs from manufacturers like Gigabyte, Kingston, Patriot, Seagate, Western Digital, XPG, 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-D15 chromax.black
Motherboard: ASUS TUF Gaming B550-Plus
RAM: Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3600 4x32GB
Graphics: ASUS Dual GeForce GTX 1060 3GB
Chassis: NZXT H710i
Storage: Western Digital WD_BLACK AN1500 2TB
Power: Seasonic PRIME Ultra Titanium 850W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB
- Crucial P1 1TB
- Crucial P2 500GB
- Crucial P5 500GB
- Gigabyte AORUS RGB AIC NVMe SSD 512GB
- Kingston KC2500 1TB
- Patriot P300 512GB
- Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB
- Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB
- Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Blue SN550 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK AN1500 2TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 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 Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
9. Benchmark: PCMark 10
10. Conclusion
