Crucial Switches to slower QLC-nand for P2-ssd Series

It appears that Crucial has begun delivering P2 SSDs with QLC nand, the SSDs were originally supplied with TLC NAND chips. Whether Crucial has totally switched over to QLC-nand is currently unknown.

Tom's Hardware was the first to identify and test the qlc versions, results revealed that the performance is much lower than that of the tlc models. Aside from the use of qlc-nand, Crucial would not have made any other changes to the SSD and the model name remains unchanged. As a result, users are unable to determine which variant they will be purchasing while many reviews are based on the faster TLC versions, which might cause confusion among readers.

Performance differences vary depending on the test, but in some cases, the P2 drive with qlc might be up to four times slower than the tlc variant, for example, while moving a 6.5 GB zip file from one location to another. Apart from that, the qlc model moved data at 98MB/s data transfer speed as opposed to 428MB/s with the original Crucial P2 model. A DiskBench test with a file of 50GB revealed that the qlc drive performs significantly worse than the qlc drive.

The SSD has a bigger pSLC provisioning as well, and thus offers less storage volume; 135GB as opposed to 24GB in the P2 with tlc-nand. Even then the tlc variation was still significantly quicker.

In addition, it is unclear whether Crucial solely manufactures qlc variations of the P2-ssd. The company Crucial previously stated in a statement released in 2020 that they may eventually transition to a "combination of tlc and qlc.

"You may notice an endurance variance between your results and our published specs, as our specs are set to allow for potential product transitions in the future," a Crucial statement says. "The Crucial P2 SSD currently relies on Micron TLC 3D NAND technology, but over time may include a mix of Micron’s TLC and QLC NAND technologies.