Crucial enters the Gen4 ultra high speed NVME area with the P5 Plus series. The Crucial P5 Plus announced back in August 2021 and it’s based upon 176-layer NAND enabling lower power, higher speed, and denser storage solutions. Additionally, Micron’s advanced 176L 3D TLC NAND and innovative controller technology, yields up to 66% faster sequential write speeds and nearly double the sequential reads of prior generation Crucial SSDs. With read speeds up to 6600MB/s, Crucial P5 Plus SSDs also enable up to 67% faster random read and 40% faster random write performance over prior Crucial Gen3 SSDs.

“With data intensive workloads on the rise, consumers increasingly demand high- performance storage solutions for their needs including engineering applications, video editing, content creation and gaming,” said Teresa Kelley, vice president and general manager of Micron’s Consumer Products Group. “By using our powerful, industry-leading 176-layer 3D NAND, coupled with the latest high-bandwidth storage interface, the P5 Plus Gen4 SSD makes lightning-fast computing storage accessible for a broad spectrum of consumers in the market.”

Ideal for a new PCIe Gen4 PC build or a PCIe Gen3 system upgrade, the P5 Plus is compatible with both and has been tested on Intel and AMD platforms including the latest 11th Generation Intel® Core™ processors and AMD Ryzen 3000 PCIe 4.0 motherboards. Likewise, these new Crucial PCIe Gen4 SSDs are backward compatible for most Gen3 PC systems that support M.2 form factors. Additionally, all P5 Plus SSDs come with Crucial Storage Executive management software for performance optimization, data security and firmware updates, as well as free cloning software to ensure easy installation right out of the box.

Proven Performance

When performance and reliability are critical, build your rig with our Micron Advanced NAND and PCIe® 4.0 NVMe™ technology. Our Crucial P5 Plus is nearly 2x4 faster than our previous generation and boasts read speeds up to 6600MB/s. The P5 Plus is developed, manufactured, and tested with Micron for end-to-end quality you can trust.

Built for Endurance

The drive is has a mean time to failure (MTTF) rating of over 2 million hours, with over 1200 written to help ensure its longevity and reliability.

Integrated Security

The Crucial P5 M.2 NVMe SSD supports OPAL2.0 and may be fully encrypted.

Advanced Features

• Advanced Features
• Dynamic write acceleration
• Redundant array of independent NAND (RAIN)
• Multistep data integrity algorithms
• Adaptive thermal protection
• Integrated power loss immunity
• Active garbage collection
• TRIM support
• NVMe standard self monitoring and reporting technology (SMART)
• Error correction code (ECC)
• NVMe autonomous power state transition (APST) support
• Device sleep support
• Full-drive encryption capable (TCG OPAL 2.0)

- Specifications

- The Package/Overview

The Crucial P5 Plus 1TB NVMe SSD comes at a price of ~183 Euro over Crucial's website, however users can find the product even lower ~155 Euro at retail market. 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 won’t find much, just the SSD drive, a quick guide and a mounting screw:

The product has 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.

According to various sources, the new P5 Plus series is one of the first drives to use Micron's new DM02A1 controller, with no real information confirmed aside that it was designed in house, has eight channels and supports hardware-based encryption. For the 1TB version of the P5 Plus, Crucial uses Micron's 176-layer (B47R) 3D TLC NAND flash. At the PCB you will find two 512GB NAND flash packages and 1GB Micron LPDDR4 DRAM chip that is used for caching.

The P5 Plus series also come with an 500GB model (~91 Euro) and 2TB (~310 Euro).

- Installation

Not much to be said here, just get the drive and plug it at an empty NVMe slot. In some boards you have to change Bios settings to Storage: PCIe in order 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 latest firmware has been already installed. Also the P5 Plus is running at PCIE x4 speed.

The CrystalDiskInfo software gives us more details: