The Crucial P3 and P3 Plus represent a new series of affordable NVME SSDs with high capacity and good price range, for both Gen3 and Gen4 enabled motherboards. Both drives are using Phison PS5021-E21 controller and 2TB of Micron's 176-layer 3D QLC NAND flash without any dedicated on-board cache flash memory installed. Crucial also offers the P5 Plus series which has much higher reading/writing speeds from both drives and its armed with 1GB of onboard cache memory to further boost performance.

So how is the performance of both drives and compared with other offers from Crucial? For sure we can say that both drives are good for everyday use. Due to the specs, the P3 Plus has the advantage of the PCI-e Gen 4, so it will be "faster"...depending the test and benchmark. How much faster? That depends... At our IOMETER tests, the performance gap was under 1000points, while at real life writing tests, the P3 Plus performs very good with single sized file, while with mixed type (folders/small files), both drives had similar performance.

We did noticed that the Crucial P3 drive produced lower running temperatures (around 9 Celsius difference), however both drives can work at much higher temperatures even close to 80 Celsius without major performance penalty. Both drives have 5 years of warranty and both drives have an endurance of 440TB (TBW), which translates around 220GB transfers per day. Both drives are being supported by Crucial's Storage Executive Software and by using their "Momentum Cache”, will help you get higher performance and reduce wear of the installed NVME. Compared with the Crucial P5 Plus, this is an overall faster drive (x2 IOMETER results), much higher endurance 1200TB (TBW) and higher retail price and a weakness with big file sizes (writing performance drops to 1.20GB/sec).

Concluding this review, we found both the Crucial P3 and P3 Plus to be affordable NVME SSDs that will boost your creativity and everyday use. The Crucial P3 and P3 Plus are offered from 500GB up to 4TB and if we had to choose one, it would be the P3 Plus model, mostly for use with PCI-e Gen 4 enabled motherboards. For other users we can suggest the Crucial P3 2TB model and for enthusiasts or really heavy users, the Crucial P5 Plus is another nice alternative. Users can find "reduced" retail prices directly from Crucial.com.