Crucial continues to introduce new products in the market, improving performance and adopting the latest available technologies for end users. Besides the high-end T705 series, Crucial has introduced a new series of budge-friendly PCIe Gen4 NVME SSDs, the P310 series. It's a 2280 Gen4 NVME that is the big brother of the P310 M2230 introduced for portable users.

The Crucial P310 2280 Gen 4 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) offers two times faster performance than Gen 3 SSDs and 40% faster performance than Crucial's P3 Plus, giving gamers, students, and creatives a boost in speed when they boot and use data-intensive applications. With capacities of up to 2 terabytes (TB) and read and write speeds of 7,100 and 6,000 megabytes per second (MB/s) respectively, the P310 2280 SSD enables more customers than ever to gain access to gaming performance without paying gaming prices.

"Micron's Crucial P310 2280 SSD delivers blazing fast gaming-level speeds, allowing users to do it all faster — from gaming to booting Windows to running multiple creative apps at the same time — without compromising on quality," said Jonathan Weech, senior director of product marketing for Micron's Commercial Products Group. "Architected with our advanced 3D NAND technology and optimized to deliver the utmost power efficiency, the 2280 SSD empowers everyone from gamers to creatives to squeeze more out of their battery life when using data-rich apps."

The Crucial P310 2280 Gen 4 SSD offers these benefits:

• Sequential read speeds of 7,100 MB/s and write speeds of 6,000 MB/s.
• Capacity options from 500 gigabytes to 1 TB or 2 TB, allowing users to store more content without worrying about size or capacity.
• 20% faster performance in real-world tasks than other Gen 4 SSDs booting Windows, starting applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and loading seamless gameplay on PCs.
• Random reads up to 1 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) and random writes up to 1.2 million IOPS.
• Up to 40% better performance-to-power ratio, allowing users to get more done on a single charge.
• Backward compatibility with Gen 3 devices.

The SSD is available in a standard M.2 2280 form factor that offers an easy-to-install solution that customers can use to upgrade their existing laptops and extend device lifecycles rather than buying new ones. A version with a heatsink will be released in the coming months and is ideally suited for use with PlayStation 5 and desktop gaming PCs.

The P310 2280 Gen 4 SSD is now available at crucial.com, as well as through select etailers, retailers and global channel partners, and it comes with a five-year warranty

Product options and model part number

- The Package/Overview

The Crucial P310 1TB NVME can be found online on Crucial's website and costs around $79.99, making it rather affordable. You can go up to 2TB (for now) even if the price is very high. In the future, Crucial will sell this drive also with a black heatsink for PS5 use. The retail box follows the latest Crucial design and includes reading speeds of 7100MB/sec at the front.

Inside the retail box, you won’t find much, just the NVME SSD drive and a quick printed guide. The product is inside a plastic shell that helps it survive transportation hazards.

It has all the typical dimensions for an M2 2280 NVME drive

and at the back, you will find all the needed information as serial number and firmware revision.

- Installation

Not much to be said here, just get the drive and plug it into an empty NVMe slot. In some boards you have to change Bios settings to Storage: PCIe to get the drive recognized. Before we start our tests, we can get some info for the drive via the Crucial Storage Executive software. The Crucial P310 1TB had the latest available firmware (V8CR000). The used controller comes from Phison E27T, has no build-in memory (HBM = Host Buffer Memory) and uses a 232-Layer Micron QLC design from Micron.

Here is what the Crucial Storage Executive Software reported over the SMART information tab

Here is more information about the drive, it runs at PCIe Gen4 and supports NVME Express 1.4 protocol.