Crucial P5 500GB NVMe M.2 SSD Review

Back in May, we had the opportunity to review the P2, Crucial's second NVMe solution to hit the market. It was noted down as an entry-level solution and performed on par with expectations. Moving into the middle of the year, we were anticipating the launch of today's drive, the P5, as its being touted as the "fastest SSD Crucial has ever made," so let's see how it all shakes down.

The P5 has a few things going for it, with the first being an all-new in-house controller designed by Micron. This leaves little room for speculation on where the drive will perform, but it's marketed at 3400/3000 for the 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities with the 250GB model taking a lower 1400 MB/s write.

Random read and write IOPS are listed at 210K/500K for the 500GB capacity while endurance is rated at 300TBW for warranty purposes and 0.3 DWPD. The Crucial P5 supports several encryption standards, including TCG Opal 2.0, IEEE 1667, and eDrive. IT is supported by Crucial Storage Executive for drive health and firmware updates.

The MSRP of the Crucial P5 in the 500GB capacity comes in at $86.99 with a five-year warranty.

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Not to be surprised, the P5 uses similar box art, as seen from past NVMe solutions. Capacity is listed bottom left.

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The back goes into more detail with support software and warranty info to the right.

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Unboxing, we have the P5 blacked out PCB and sticker with simple crucial branding and P5.

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Pulling that sticker, we have our first look at the build; two package NW972 design for the 500GB capacity; TLC NAND, of course. We have a DRAM package to the right, followed by the controller.

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The NVMe SSD controller is labeled DM0182.

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As noted above, the P5 is supported by Crucial Executive.

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CDM is a staple in performance testing; version 7 has seen some updates in the workloads used for testing. Sequential performance gets pretty close to maxing out Gen3 at 3381 MB/s read and 2889 MB/s write. 4KQ1 touches 53.5 MB/s read and 128 MB/s write.

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ATTO is yet another popular benchmark for storage performance that breaks down performance. Peak read performance rolls in around 4M at 3.1 GB/s. Write performance starts a bit earlier at 64K around 2.7 GB/s.

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PCMark10 Quick showed some rather interesting results with the P5 landing below all of the DRAMless solutions tested but above the PM981 and P2.

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Into Full System Drive, we see similar results, the P5 just above the PM981 but falling behind all of the DRAMless solutions.

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Price/Performance gets a bit dirty for the P5. At its current MSRP of $86.99, the drive doesn't have the performance to pull itself off the bottom of our charts.

Wrapping this up, the P5 undoubtedly has solid build quality coming from Micron. NAND is likely the pick of the litter with Crucial offering NW972 on our sample, 96L TLC NAND flash. It also has a solid set of encryption features from TCG Opal to eDrive and an all-new controller designed in house by Micron.

Sequential performance is pretty high, very close to maxing out the interface. I was able to reach 3.3 GB/s read and 2.8 GB/s write in CDM. ATTO, on the other hand, showed read performance had a slow start reaching full speed at 4M while write performance came in around 64K.

PCMark10 was a bit rough for the P5 ending up behind our batch of DRAMless solutions at 1485 in the Quick System Drive and 1385 in Full System Drive. Piling on, Price/Performance for the P5 landed it at the bottom of our chart at 89%.

Closing this out, the P5 needs tuning, and maybe Crucial can do that through firmware, but our 500GB capacity solution doesn't beat out drives powered by the 2263XT in daily OS scenarios. That said, it is one of the quickest drives on the market for sequential performance, and that alone would make it a solid candidate for external storage.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Crosshair VIII Formula X570 (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (buy from Amazon)
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB 2x8GB DDR4 3600 (buy from Amazon)
• Cooler: Corsair Hydro H60 (buy from Amazon)
• Case: Corsair Carbide 275R (buy from Amazon)
• OS Storage: Corsair MP600 1TB (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: Corsair RM850x (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)