Once again today, SSDs are selling for incredibly low prices. The price of solid state storage has plummeted in recent years, but Amazon (opens in new tab) doesn't seem to be done yet, as this Crucial P3 Plus drive is $225 for 4 terabytes of storage.
Crucial's P3 Plus is an NVMe SSD, which is ideal for storing large amounts of game install files and video content. It is not a drive I would recommend as primary storage, as it typically uses QLC NAND and has a slower controller than other modern PCIe 4.0 drives, but it is cheaper than the 4TB WD_Black SN850X (open in new tab).
Much cheaper.
For $225, you get enough gigabytes. In our review of the 2TB version of this drive, we said it wasn't cheap enough at $179. However, doubling the storage capacity for just 25% more money erases any concerns we had about the drive's performance at its original price, and we like it a lot.
However, as we said, this is not the fastest drive; it is a PCIe 4.0 SSD with sequential reads at 4,800 MB/s and sequential writes at 4,100 MB/s. It is important to note that these speeds decrease when the SLC cache is all full. This is essentially a portion of the QLC NAND capacity provisioned to act as SLC NAND storage for faster transfers.
With a 4TB drive like this, there is actually a significant amount of storage that can be provisioned as faster SLC NAND. But when it fills up, expect performance to drop off a cliff; QLC is pretty slow.
Here is a benchmark of a 2TB drive. Performance is slightly different, but overall will be about the same.
However, in general use, most gamers will not encounter any issues with gaming performance if they leave some storage free on the P3 Plus. The 2TB Crucial P3 Plus, in the suite of benchmarks we ran It maintains fairly good scores, and its operating temperatures are not too high.
There are better SSDs out there, such as the 12,000 MB/s Crucial T700 (opens in new tab), but as a secondary game library drive, the value the P3 Plus currently offers is very good.
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