- Crucial P2 500GB NVME SSD

Micron recently announced that it was expanding its line of NVMe SSDs under the Crucial banner with the introduction of the Crucial P2 series. The new end user drive is aimed at gamers and PC enthusiasts. Basically, the expanded P-Series aims to up performance in a cost-effective manner.

The Crucial P2 is an entry-level NVMe SSD that for now comes in low capacities of 250GB and 500GB, and retail price is reduced by uusing a DRAMless controller with TLC NAND. Crucial doens't mention which controller is being used with the P2 series but performance should be enough for entery level users. The official press release does mention up to 1TB capacities, perhaps this will come in the near future. Lastly, Crucial mention that the 500GB model's endurance rating is up to 150TB.

Built with Micron 3D NAND (96L 3D TLC NAND) the Crucial 500GB P2 NVMe PCIe M.2 Internal SSD utilizes NVMe technology and the PCIe Gen 3 M.2 interface for quick performance. Whether it's for loading games, storing your work files, or creating content, the P2 drive can help things move along faster. Performance-wise, it has sequential read and write speed of up to 2300 MB/s and 940 MB/s respectively. Once it's installed, users can take advantage of the included Crucial Storage Executive and Acronis True Image for Crucial software for managing drive health and backing-up data.

NVMe Technology
While a SATA SSD can offer a big performance boost compared to a standard 3.5" hard drive, a NVMe drive is faster than that. Utilizing the PCIe Gen 3 interface, these SSDs can support sequential read and write speeds of over 2000 MB/s.

Included Software
SSD management software is included for performance optimization, data security, and firmware updates.

- Specifications

- The Package/Overview

The Crucial P2 500GB NVMe SSD comes at a very affordable price of ~70 Euro indicating for a strong performance/price ratio index. In fact you pay 0.14 Euro per Gigabyte of storage data. Users can buy the product direct from Crucial's website.

The retail box is rather typical for a Crucial product and has all the logos for users to identify it. Inside the retail box you wont find much, just the SSD drive:

The product has typical dimensions for an M2 2280 drive and can be used in all situations that you have an NVME slot (either in desktop or laptop use).

The P2 series also come with an 250GB model, however we will not recoomend it since nowadays 500GB is a good base to start with.

- Installation

Not much to be said here, just get the drive and plugit at an empty NVMe slot. In some boards you have to change Bios settings to Storage: PCIe in order to get the drive recognized.