Crucial Launches P1 NVMe M.2 SSD

Crucial has officially launched their newest drive, the Crucial P1. The P1 is an NVMe M.2 SSD with a capacity up from 500GB over 1TB to 2TB. Okay, the 2TB hasn’t launched yet, but it will shortly.

Crucial P1 NVMe M.2 SSD

The new P1 SSD follows the same trend that we’ve seen from Crucial in the past. It isn’t the fastest, but it is consistent. It is also designed so it can be your only drive, whether you’re a casual, gamer, or enthusiast.

The drive is built with Micron’s quad-level cell (QLC) NAND technology and it is one of the first drives to hit the market with this NAND technology. It allows you to store more data in the same space, hence allowing the company to offer a cheaper drive per GB.

Performance

We get a good solid mid-range NVMe performance from the P1 with up to up to 2,000/1,700 MB/s sequential read/write speeds. Those numbers are for the 1TB version. The 2TB increases the write performance to 1,750 MB/s while it keeps the same read performance. The smallest 500GB model comes in at 1,900/950 MB/s which isn’t bad either.

The random performance is rated at 250K for both 4K reads and writes on the 2TB model. The smaller 1TB comes in at 170K/240K while the 500GB comes in at 90K/220K. While those aren’t record-breaking speeds, they aren’t bad either.

The P1 provides the performance via hybrid-dynamic write acceleration, a unique SLC cache implementation.

A place where it does seem to shine a lot is in PCMark 8’s storage benchmark, which is a real-world performance test. The mixed-mode throughputs go up to 565MB/s here while the score comes in over 5080 points. That’s quite a bit higher than we’re used to from budget drives.

Endurance

The drive offers an MTTF of 1.8 million hours and an endurance of up to 200TB total bytes written, with power usage at an active average of 100mW. Again, those figures represent the 1TB model. The 2TB doubles on the TBW rating while the 500GB halves it.

Crucial backs the drive with a 5-year warranty which is a win on any day.

What does Crucial and other People have to say about the P1?

“We’ve been making SSDs for over a decade now, and we’ve watched computing habits change dramatically over that time,” said Teresa Kelley, VP & GM, Micron Consumer Products Group. “The need for more system speed and storage has never been more important than it is today. That’s why we’ve paid special attention to our customers’ real-world computing tasks and designed the Crucial P1 SSD to deliver all the performance, capacity, and features they need at an affordable price point.”

“We’ve been using Crucial SSDs in our gaming rigs for the past year and a half,” said Patrik Sattermon, Chief Gaming Officer at FNATIC. “The speeds the new P1 NVMe drive offers are impressive, and we look forward to accelerated boot-ups and game loads. Plus, with some games now taking almost 100GB of space, the extra storage the new P1 SSD offers is most welcome. We’re excited to be installing these drives into our Team FNATIC systems.”

Advanced Features

The P1 SSD offers a range of additional benefits. After all, it’s a Micron product. You get Data loss protection via the Multistep Data Integrity Algorithm and protection from overheating via Adaptive Thermal Monitoring tools. The faster writes come from the Hybrid-Dynamic Write Acceleration technology while data protection at the component level is added via Redundant Array of Independent NAND. The last is probably one of my favourite features in modern solid state drives.