The drives were brand new and have their latest firmware installed, according to the Crucial Storage Executive Software.

Let’s start our tests. The advertised reading/writing speeds for the P3 series are 3.50GB/sec reading / 3.0GB/sec writing, while for the P3 Plus, we get a boost to 5.0GB/sec reading and 4.2GB/sec writing.

In order to test the NVME drive r we used the following configuration:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
• Thermal compound: bequiet! DC1
• Case: bequiet! Silent Base 802
• Case fans: 2x140 bequiet! Silent Wings 3 High-Speed RPM speed controllable via SmartFan BIOS + Asus Xpert4 software
• CPU Fan: Stock 2x120mm Noctua
• Motherboard: Asus X570 E-Gaming with 4048 BIOS
• Memory: 2x16GB G.skill Trident Z RGB CL14 @ 3200MHz CL14 (XMP Profile) @ 1.35V
• PSU: be quiet! Straight Power 11 650Watt
• HDD: Crucial MX500 SSD
• VGA: Asus 1060 6GB Dual
• Operating system: Windows 10 x64 with all the latest updates installed

The first test and quick result comes from the Samsung Magician Storage software that includes a build-in benchmark. As we can see the P3 2TB operates according its specification, while the P3 Plus, showed higher sequential reading/writing speeds.

Let's start the comparison with the CrystalDiskMark various revisions between P3 and P3 Plus 2TB NVME SSDs

There are differences as was expected, since the P3 Plus is a "faster" due to its PCI-e Gen4 protocol. However there are some cases, where the P3 has slight higher performance with the RND4K tests, mostly in reading results...Maybe this will affect later overall results? We will find out later on, keep reading.

The AJA Test Suite also gives a quick read/write test result.

Passing to the AS SSD Benchmark, we got better reading/writing results from the P3 Plus and higher overall score. However again at the copy tests, we did saw that the P3 manages to finish faster or equal to what the P3 Plus delivers.

Using the HWiNFO64 software we did measured working temperatures for both P3 and P3 Plus...It's obvious that the P3 runs at much lower temperatures compared with the P3 Plus version (max 67 vs 76 Celsius), both drives were running with passive cooling installed (stock Asus NVME coolers).

More comparison results from the ATTO Disk Benchmark, with the 2.0 version all Gen4 drives show reduced performance,

, while with the latest ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01.0f1 version we got very good results from both tested drives. The P3 Plus showed (probably cached performance), up to 6.90GB/sec reading..

While testing both drives with Intel's IOMETER test files, we got similar performance with only 731.13 points difference.

How about testing/compare with other Crucial 2TB NVME SSD drives? We performed the same tests with the same system and the results might surprise you..

The first test was to copy from a Samsung 980Pro 1TB NVME SSD a 47GB Single file to each Crucial NVME SSD with the Terracopy Software and measure the average writing speed for each drive. In our surprise both Crucial P3 Plus and P5 Plus had exactly the same writing speed with this test. The Crucial P3 and P5 2TB drives also had similar performance with minor differences.

Performing the same test with a single 218GB file, gave us much more interesting results. While we expected the Crucial P5 Plus 2TB to excel, it came at the latest place...why this happens you may ask? Well the drive after 105GB mark, drops its writing speed from 3.69GB/sec down to 1.2GB/sec, so overall it gave the higher writing time. The Crucial P3 and P3 Plus doesn't seem to get affected and product stable recording speed in the whole test with very good and close to its specification writing speed.

While single files probably won't be a so realistic scenario, we used a folder with many files, either small/big and various folders. Again the folder copying from the Samsung 980Pro 1TB drive (one of the fastest around) so we would eliminate possible reading bottlenecks. Both the Crucial P3 and P3 Plus drives seems to produce identical results with 1.28GB/sec writing performance, while the higher end, Crucial P5 Plus has a slight lower writing speed with 1.25GB/sec.

Passing to more comparisons, the Crucial P5 Plus 2TB gets the highest (as was expected) performance.

Due to the DRAM-less design, the Crucial P3 and P3 Plus have much higher response time compared with the P5 and P5 Plus drives that include onboard cache.