Crucial has been surprisingly dilly-dallying on the rollout of its high-performance NVMe solid state drives. The new Crucial P5 Plus has been tested in a 1TB configuration, but there is little to change this situation. As such, it's unlikely to plague our list of the best SSDs for gaming, but it's still at an attractive price point. [It has been more than two years since the first M.2 drive with a PCIe Gen 4 interface was introduced. But now Crucial has introduced its own competitor. Of course, Intel's relatively recent release of a PCIe 4.0-capable desktop platform, namely Rocket Lake, is another recent development. Even today, the percentage of existing PCs that support Gen 4 is low, and many new desktops are still being sold without support.

In any case, Crucial is in the business of producing mainstream drives in large volumes. Therefore, it probably makes sense to wait until the ecosystem is in place and ready for new technologies. Coincidentally, Crucial is also in the business of manufacturing every inch of its own SSD technology. Of course, Crucial is a retail brand of Micron, one of the world's leading chipmakers. [As a result, the Crucial P5 Plus is not only the brand's first PCIe Gen 4 drive. It also features Micron's latest TLC or triple-level cell flash memory. This new 176-layer NAND chip is said to be a significant upgrade over Micron's familiar 96-layer flash. It is claimed to offer lower latency, higher throughput, and better endurance. In other words, it is superior in almost every metric.

Not much is known about Crucial's new PCIe Gen 4 controller chip. The previous Gen 3 generation had six cores, and this one may well do the same. All we know for sure is that this 1TB drive has eight memory channels and up to 1GB of DDR4 cache. Incidentally, the 500 GB model has the same amount of cache, and the 2 TB drive has 2 GB.

Other features supported by the improved controller include hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption and an obligatory SLC cache mode that allows a portion of the drive to be dynamically assigned to operate in a faster single-level cell mode. According to Crucial, the 1TB P5 Plus delivers 6,600MB/s read and 5,000MB/s write at peak. On paper, this is a bit off the pace of very fast PCIe Gen 4 drives such as the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus and the Adata XPG Gammix S70. However, the theoretical bandwidth is still around GB/sec.

Crucial's claims for random access performance are also adequate, but not class-leading: the 1TB P5 Plus has 630,000 read IOPS and 700,000 write IOPS. Incidentally, the Samsung 980 Pro has 1 million IOPS in both directions, and the WD Black SN850 has 1 million read IOPS and 710,000 write IOPS.

To summarize the relevant speeds and feeds, this 1TB model has a write endurance of 600TB, which should be sufficient for all but the most demanding users. This also covers the expected use cases for most installations. On the software side, in addition to Crucial's own drive management app, the drive also comes with Acronis Cloning, which is useful when migrating an existing OS to a new drive.

As for the trivial question of how this drive actually performs, it is definitely suitable for the claimed peak sequential, with writes fully matching CrystalDiskMark's 5,000MB/s figure and reads slightly above 6,800MB/s. The performance is definitely suitable for the claimed peak sequential performance. Slightly less energetic are the 4K random numbers with short queue depths: QD1 reads at only 69 MB/sec and writes at 174 MB/sec.

These are not catastrophic results. However, to cite a couple of examples, WD's Black SN850 and WD's Black SN850 recorded about 90MB/sec and 315MB/sec respectively, and all the other PCIe 4.0 drives we tested were at least a bit faster.

Of course, such overall results only tell part of the story; in PC Mark, the Crucial P5 Plus scored 3,140 points on the Full Storage Index, one of the best performances we've seen to date! We've seen it perform well in the past. On the other hand, the P5 Plus did not necessarily excel in Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringer-level load tests.

If there is a more serious question, it concerns long-term sustained performance and heat. In our internal file copy test, we found that performance degraded after about 300 GB of writes. This probably reflects the size of the dynamically allocated SLC cache. However, a temporary blip was seen above 200 GB/sec, which could be thermal throttling. In our tests, the P5 Plus was quite hot, registering 69°C.

While it is difficult to say that the SSD overheated, this drive clearly has no cooling capability. Therefore, we are not at all confident about the thermal performance of the drive as it ages. It is certainly unlikely to improve with use.

Overall, the Crucial P5 Plus is attractively priced for a PCIe Gen 4 drive with high-quality TLC rather than inexpensive QLC flash memory, and undercuts most of the competition. compared to more expensive drives like WD Black, it has a reasonable margins. In that sense, if we had felt particularly price sensitive, we wouldn't have cared about minor concerns about operating temperatures or IOPS performance.

A 1TB drive that packs such a punch would provide a very nice overall computing experience, while at the same time providing ample storage for our library of favorite games, relegating only the titles we don't play much to an inconvenient old magnetic drive or perhaps a You would be able to relegate them to a worn-out SSD. Let's do that.