Crucial P5 Plus PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

The P5 Plus is among the first drives to get PCIe Gen 4.0 support, this round from Crucial. The performance of this drive is noticeable better than that of previous-generation drives. Aiming to provide gamers with faster load times and more efficient workflow experiences, the Crucial P5 Plus has been designed with exactly that in mind. It is not the extreme uber premium fastest SSD, yet is close to that level, offers lovely features, and comes at an attractive price, this PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD delivers excellent performance overall. This SSD looks very tidy on the PCB side and seems well-built. 

Endurance

We've talked about endurance previously; it's the number of times NAND cells can be written before they begin to malfunction. It is sufficient to remark that the values for QLC written (4 bits saved in a single NAND cell) are not particularly good at it. On this point, however, I always like to paraphrase Einstein: "Relativity, my man," he said. You can improve endurance by increasing the volume of your training sessions. 98 percent of your data is stored in a 'cold' state on your SSD and does nothing, and it is only the 2 percent of data that is written that is important. Volume sizes that are larger result in more NAND cells, and more NAND cells result in greater endurance.

The P5 PLUS however uses TLC written NAND and our 1TB model has 600 TB written capacity, the 2TB model has a proper 1400 TB written capacity for endurance. Now, if a NAND cell fails, it does not necessarily indicate that your data is lost. Many algorithms are constantly monitoring and managing your data; for example, if a cell's lifetime is about to expire, the bits inside that cell will be relocated to a more healthy cell.

So how long does a 600 TWB storage unit last before NAND flash cells go the way of the dodo? Well, if you are a really extreme user, you might be writing 50 GB per day (really, normal users probably won't even write that per week), but based on that value, 50GB x 365days= 18.25 TB per year written. You get 600 TBW, so that's almost 33 years of usage and half that for the 500 GB SSD version and double that for a 2TB version. Let me make it very clear, 50 GB per day each day of the year is a very ambitious number.

Performance

Taken just by its performance indices, it is among the faster (not fastest) drives for mainstream trace and sustained workloads. Keep in mind that the synthetic benchmarks, in which the P5 PLUS does exceptionally well, skew the picture; in real-world testing, the SSD remains one of the faster units, but the competition is close. Trace testing shows very good numbers, the random 4K IOPS in queues go through the roof. The linear performance remains great as well as sustained. The SSD managed to write linear for ~32% of the drive, so it wrote at ~4800MB/sec for roughly ~325GB continuously. That is impressive. 

Concluding

The Crucial P5 Plus is the company's “upgraded” P5 NVMe SSD range. According to Crucial, it's aimed at professionals, creators, gamers, and consumers who want to take advantage of their new Gen4-compatible motherboard. It also has advanced features like Dynamic write acceleration, adaptive heat protection, error correction code, and full-drive encryption capability. Performance-wise it falls somewhere in the middle of the finest PCIe Gen3 and Gen4 drives, although, of course, this is still dependent on the workload and other factors. For a PCIe Gen 4 drive with premium, TLC flash memory rather than QLC flash memory. The Crucial P5 Plus is undoubtedly reasonably priced compared say a WD Black. In terms of relative performance, regardless of how well this drive actually performs, it is undoubtedly good for the peak sequential, with writes in CrystalDiskMark consistently exceeding the 5000~6000 MB/s figure and reads significantly higher at over 6800MB/s. The small queue depth 4K random numbers are a little less exhilarating to see, but still completely fine. The QD1 reads are bounded to roughly 70 MB/s, while the QD1 writes are limited to 185 MB/s. Overall, the drive is a reliable and secure PCIe 4.0 x4 option, which is especially appealing to the many die-hard Crucial enthusiasts who have flocked to it. Of course, to get the best out of it, you'll need a PCIe Gen 4 infrastructure, and at the time of writing, that means a compatible Ryzen processor on, say, a B550 or X570 chipset-based platform. Intel started with PCIe gen 4.0 as well for Z590, Z690 (Alder Lake), etc. This SSD shivers in performance given the right conditions, and for the rest of them, on some workloads, you are down to proper high-end class NVMe performance. Crucial backs the storage unit with a five-year warranty, that or the TBW value reached.  Crucial currently provides the drive in three different capacities: 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. The P5 Plus 1TB pretty much occupies the center of the PCIe Gen 4.0 pack for the majority of our testing, which is fine with us because when the P5 Plus was called upon to perform admirably in the most critical and crucial situations (pardon the pun). The only area where this drive could be better is in the area of heavy file writes, that situation where the cache becomes saturated and the underlying pure TLC NAND performance is writing directly. But we're inclined to say that you'll very likely never even notice a significant loss in performance, but anyone considering purchasing this gear should be aware of these limits. In the end, we feel the Crucial P5 Plus is a worthy successor to the P5 and provides the PCIe 4.0 advancement that many customers have been asking for for quite some time. Definitely recommended. 

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