Storage

Crucial P2 & P5 Review

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August 7, 2020 7 Min Read
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Crucial recently announced two new M.2 SSDs – the P2 and P5, both are PCIe 3.0 driven but are vastly different in terms of performance. Should you consider them for internal storage?


Product on Review: P2 SSD & P5 SSD
Manufacturer: Crucial
Street Price: P2 – $65 USD | £63 GBP | $110 AUD (500GB): P5 (1TB): $180 USD | £177 GBP | $299 AUD

The SATA-based SSD market has now become quite stagnant and saturated. Prices have tumbled in recent years which has been great for mainstream users who can benefit from a slice of solid state action. However, with the arrival of AMD and Intel platforms supplying generous allocation for NVMe technology and M.2 pricing having also dropped significantly, never has there been a better time to breach that 550MB/s threshold and benefit from a faster storage drive.

Up for review today are two drives from Crucial which have only recently been unveiled. The P2 and P5 storage drives are both PCIe 3.0-based M.2 SSDs which promise to deliver good value and exceptional performance. The P2 is marketed towards the entry-level division, while the P5 is touted as brand’s fastest SSD to-date claiming to hit 3500MB/s.


About Crucial
Every time you press your system’s power button, load apps, save documents, stream content or virtualize databases, you’re using memory or storage. As a brand of Micron, one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world, we bring you the quality and expertise that’s been built into new computers for 35-plus years. You’ll notice the difference.

Technical Specifications


Below are the technical specifications surrounding the P2 and P5:

P2

Capacity
256GB, 500GB

Form Factor
M.2 2280

Interface
PCIe Gen3x4

Speed
Read: 2300MB/s Write: 940MB/s

NAND flash
TLC

Operating Temperature
0° to 70° C

Storage Temperature
-40° C to 85° C

Shock Resistant
1500G, duration 0.5ms, Half Sine Wave


P5

Capacity
256GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB

Form Factor
M.2 2280

Interface
PCIe Gen3x4

Speed
Read: 3400MB/s Write: 3000MB/s

NAND flash
TLC

Operating Temperature
0° to 70° C

Storage Temperature
-40° C to 85° C

Shock Resistant
1500G, duration 0.5ms, Half Sine Wave

Closer Look



Both drives arrive in almost identical packaging with very little information on the front/back. There are no accessories as such, just warranty documentation. Each drive does however sit within a plastic enclosure to ensure safe arrival.

P2 and P5 conform to the M.2 form factor and more specifically the 2280 variant. The only noticeable difference from the externals is that P2 is presented with a blue/white sticker on the front side, while the P5 is adorned in a more sleek, black sticker. The latter will naturally blend into any motherboard much more easily – though, many motherboards nowadays usually come with their own M.2 heatsinks which will cover the drive anyway.


Under the hood, the P2 is somewhat different to the P5. P2 features the Phison E13T SSD controller and Micron’s 96-Layer TLC flash. Whereas the P5 features Crucial’s very own DM01B2 controller with twin Micro 96-Layer TLC flash. While the P2 is DRAM-less, the P5 boasts 1GB Micro LPDDR4. Such beefed up engineering in the P5 will ultimately lend it to tapping in to much higher transfer rates and IOPS results which we’ll see on the preceding pages. P5 is touted as Crucial fastest SSD to-date, laying claim to speeds of up to 3400MB/s.

Test Setup & Methodology


Our test system is formatted and a fresh version of Windows is installed with just drives in place – no additional applications. Windows is then updated to the latest release and the drivers are installed.

Included in the list of benchmarks are the following applications:

BENCHMARKS

Anvil Pro
AS SSD
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46
Futuremark PCMark 8
AIDA64


TEST CONFIG

CPU Intel Core i9-10900K
Motherboard MSI Z490 UNIFY
Graphics MSI RX 5700 XT GAMING X
Memory 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200MHz DDR4
Storage Crucial P2 and P5
PSU Corsair HX1050 Gold
OS Microsoft Windows 10 Professional 64-Bit

Benchmarks: Anvil Pro


Anvil Pro from Anvil Storage utilities is one of the most popular storage benchmarking utilities today thanks to the large suit of tests available. You can test pretty much anything from Read/write Speed to IOPs with many variables to tweak allowing you to get either a single or host of results to compare with other likeminded enthusiasts. In our test we ran the standard suite 5 times, subtracting both the highest and lowest scores and determined the final result from the average of the remaining three results.

Benchmarks: AS SSD


AS SSD Benchmark is a straightforward tool for measuring the speed of your SSD drive.

Simply launch the program, choose your drive, click Start, and it’ll test your SSD’s read and write speed in a variety of ways, delivering a score for each when it’s done. And if that’s not enough, there are also additional file copy and compression-related benchmarks available from the Tools menu. (The author’s support page is German only, but if you need further English explanations then there’s a thread on the program at the OCZ Technology forum.).

Benchmarks: ATTO

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.


Benchmarks: AIDA64

AIDA64 Product Page
This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example — with HyperThreading disabled — the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.

Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark


CrystalDiskMark is an open source disk drive benchmark tool for Microsoft Windows. Based on Microsoft’s MIT-licensed Diskspd tool, this graphical benchmark is commonly used for testing the performance of solid-state storage. It works by reading and writing through the filesystem in a volume-dependent way. It generates read/write speeds in sequential and random positions with varying numbers of queues and threads.

Conclusion


Prices for PCIe 3.0 SSDs have tumbled in the last 18 months, since we’re now well into the lifecycle for such storage, and it may seem strange for Crucial to arrive on the scene with two new drives. Other brands have, by now, already gained a lot of traction.

Both drives under review today did a great job in the storage benchmark suite. The P5 being a notable exception – climbing to the top of the leaderboard on countless occasions. In fact, the P5 managed to almost max out the available bandwidth from the interface. We would have no reservations about recommending either SSD, but if there is a small price difference, the P5 is well worth the extra!


While the P2 is only available in 256GB and 500GB models, the P5 has more options: 256GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. Today we reviewed the P2 500GB model which is priced at: $65 USD | £63 GBP | $110 AUD and the P5 1TB model which is priced at: $180 USD | £177 GBP | $299 AUD. Both drives come with a 5 year warranty which certainly applies a level of confidence in the product. At this price point, P2 and P5 are in line with other rival options so we believe them to be decent value for money.

Although the P2 and P5 SSDs may be a little late to the party, they both offer excellent performance, with the P5 excelling in any scenario it is featured in. If you’re in the market for a lightning fast storage drive, you should definitely consider either options.

Pros
+ Excellent overall performance
+ Easy on the eye
+ Reasonably priced
+ 5 Years Warranty

Cons
– None apparent


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