» The Crucial P5 Plus review: high performance at a great price

The Crucial P5 Plus review: high performance at a great price

The NVME M.2 SSD are increasingly popular: they are internal drives in their usual state, to be installed directly on the PCIe M.2 port of the motherboard, capable of writing and reading data at very high speeds. Usually in SSDs of this type we install the operating system and the heaviest programs that we use most often, to increase productivity. Today we talk about the M.2 SSD Crucial P5 Plusequipped with the latest technology Gen4 and capable of reaching read speeds up to 6600MB / s: here is our review.

Crucial P5 Plus review: minimal and elegant

The M.2 SSD P5 Plus by Crucial it looks like all the other devices in this sector: in fact, inside the package we find nothing but the actual unit and a ***** to be able to securely fix the device to the motherboard. There is also a small sheet containing the link to access the installation instructions, al data transfer software and other information.

The SSD is aesthetically very sober, with a Black PCB and a very clean black sticker that shows only the company logo and the model name. Obviously there is no lack of conformity marks and SKUs, but they are placed on the back, the part that is hidden once the SSD is mounted.

Installation is pretty straightforward and it is identical to how we proceed for all SSDs of this type. In fact, it is enough to open the casing of your PC – in our case a desktop PC – to find it M.2 slot present on the motherboard, insert the SSD and fix it carefully with the *****. Obviously all these operations must be done with the PC turned off.

If you use the SSD as a secondary drive, you just have to turn on the PC to find in the Windows Disk Management – or in the respective program for the other operating systems – the new drive without partitions. Now you need to create a new partition to be able to use the disk and take advantage of the read speed up to 6600 MB / s. If, on the other hand, you want to use the SSD to install the operating system, just select it during the installation process and that’s it. Obviously the unit is also backward compatible with motherboards without PCIe 4.0, so Gen3, even if it gives its best with the latest generation.

The features on the card

Crucial P5 Plus uses an updated controller with a memory 176-layer Micron Advanced 3D NAND which allows you to achieve excellent performance: the company claims that the SSD can achieve a 5000 MB / s write speed and 66000 MB / s read speed for the 1TB and 2TB variants, with 700,000 write IOPS and 720,000 read IOPS for the 2TB one. The 500GB variant instead differs in the 4000 MB / s in writing and 360.000 IOPS in reading. There Crucial’s warranty is 5 yearswith a TBW (terabytes written) value of 300TB for the little brother, 600TB for the 1TB cut and 1200TB for the 2TB big brother: this value indicates the life cycle of SSDs.

In addition to high speed, this model offers advanced features such as 256-bit AES full disk encryption with hardware acceleration based on the TCG OPAL 2.0 specification or adaptive thermal protection that activates at a temperature of 80 degrees to protect data. Through the software Crucial Storage Executive, which also allows you to monitor the drive and update the firmware, we can take advantage of features such as momentum cache and the ability to optimize the performance of the SSD. Crucial also makes the software available Acronis True Imagewhich allows you to clone data from old drives to the P5 Plus.

Crucial P5 Plus review: how it performs in real life

Now that we’ve pitted the features on paper, let’s see how this Crucial M.2 P5 Plus SSD performs in everyday life. We used different programs to generate the benchmarks, then compared them with other SSDs. The programs used for the benchmarks are: ATTO Benchmark, CrystalDiskMark and Anvil’s Storage Utilities. Comparisons were made with a Kioxia Exceria Plus M.2 SSD (PCIe 3.0), of which you can read the review here.

We started with the ATTO Disk Benchmark test, which measures drive performance by performing write and read tests of different sizes. The disk in question reached incredible speeds with a peak of 6.32GB / s read and 4.5GB / s write. For comparison, the Kioxia Exceria Plus had stopped at 3.02GB / s in writing and 3.16GB / s in reading, obviously this is an SSD with a PCIe 3.0 interface, but it is worth noting the huge difference.

Then we moved on to Anvil’s Storage Utilities test, a benchmark program that, like the others, is meant to measure the performance of a storage drive. Our test SSD scored well 21.601.29. For comparison, the M.2 Kioxia reached 16,084.43, which is one step behind the Crucial P5 Plus.

Finally we performed a benchmark via CrystalDiskMark – this software is capable of analyzing the sequential and random performance of a storage drive. Here, too, we were certainly not surprised: Crucial’s P5 Plus achieved 6523.05MB / s in reading and 5008.54MB / s in writing. Also for comparison, the Kioxia Exceria Plus reached 3417.72MB / s in reading and 3231.06MB / s in writing. The only flaw we found was in the slight overheating drive during benchmarks.

Crucial P5 Plus: buy it or not?

This Crucial P5 Plus is a truly performing PCIe 4.0 unit, which in practice reflects the performance announced by the company in the technical specifications. This SSD will certainly not disappoint you for speed and reliability, being in line with other PCIe Gen4 drives, but with a price often lower than its competitors: the 1TB version, for example, is available on Amazon well under 200 euros. Although it is an internal unit, the eye also wants its part, and aesthetically it is really elegant and beautiful: undoubtedly we recommend the purchase!