Crucial P3 & P3 Plus 2TB NVME SSD

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Crucial recently announced a new series of NVME, the P3 Plus series that further boost performance compared with the P3 series, with the adoption of the Gen4 ultra high speed NVME protocol. The design of the P3 Plus series is 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.

Main features

Upgrade your PC with the fast Gen4 performance it needs at a price you want. The Crucial P3 Plus NVMe SSD delivers load times and data transfers that are 8.9x faster than SATA5 and 43% faster than the fastest Gen3 SSDs3.
With generous space of up to 4TB, the Crucial P3 Plus offers powerful Gen4 storage for loads of apps, programs, files, docs, photos, videos, and games — with room to spare.
Crucial P3 Plus Gen4 NVMe SSDs are built with high-quality Micron® Advanced 3D NAND, tested and validated to the exacting standards you’ve come to expect from one of the world’s largest manufacturers of flash memory. Want proof? Go check out our award-winning line of SSDs.
Gen4 technology, SSD management software for performance optimization, and firmware updates give the Crucial P3 Plus Gen4 NVMe SSD everything you need for security and peace of mind.

Advanced Features for both P3 and P3 Plus series

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)
Device sleep support

- Comparison between various Crucial NVME SSDs

Model	P3 CT2000P3SSD8	P3 Plus CT2000P3PSSD8	P5 CT2000P5SSD8	P5 Plus CT2000P5PSSD8
Capacity	2TB
Price	$136.99	$143.99	$???.?? (EOL)	$164.99
Interface	PCIe 3.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4	PCIe 3.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4
Sequential Read Speed	3500 MB/s	5000 MB/s	3400 MB/s	6600 MB/s
Sequential Write Speed	3000 MB/s	4200 MB/s	3000 MB/s	5000 MB/s
Form Factor	M.2 2280
Endurance (Total Bytes Written)	440TB (TBW)		1200TB (TBW)	1200TB (TBW)
Reliability (MTTF)	1.5 million hours		1.8 million hours	2 million hours
Dimensions (W x H x D)	22 x 80 x 2.4 mm
Warranty Length Limited	5-Year Warranty

- The Package/Overview

The Crucial P3 Plus 2TB can be found at a price of ~$143.99 at Crucial's website, which is a great price. 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 NVME 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.

Both the P3 and P3 Plus series include improved controllers (Phison PS5021-E21) and 2TB of Micron's 176-layer 3D QLC – Quadruple-Level-Cell NAND flash. Note that there isn't any dedicated cache flash memory installed, hence the reduced price against the P5 Plus series.

- 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.

Crucial P3 2TB

The CrystalDiskInfo software gives us more information about the drive, it runs at PCIe 3.0 x4 and supports NVME Express 1.4

The drive can run up the high temperatures of 85 and 95 Celsius, which of course are not suggested, but it shows that Crucial is very confident about their own chipsets.

Crucial P3 Plus 2TB