Crucial P1 500GB NVMe PCIe M.2 Solid State Drive

Model: Crucial P1 500GB NVMe PCIe M.2 Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: Crucial
Provided By: Crucial

Crucial is a global brand of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the largest memory and flash storage manufacturers in the world. The company's product lineup includes award-winning solid state drives (SSDs) and computer memory upgrades (DRAM) for more than 50,000 systems. These products have been qualified and approved by major original equipment manufacturers and every single module has been rigorously tested at the component and module level. Each SSD also undergoes over a thousand hours of prerelease validation testing and hundreds of qualification tests to ensure optimal reliability and performance.

This fall, Crucial launched its first NVMe PCIe SSD, the P1. Designed for the enthusiast or gamer on a budget, this M.2 form factor drive is powered by Silicon Motion's new SM2263EN controller and is available with up to 2TB of Micron's 3D QLC NAND flash. To compensate for the slow write speeds typically associated with QLC NAND, the P1 uses a unique SLC cache implementation called hybrid-dynamic write acceleration to provide consistent performance. To top it all off, the drive is equipped with an ultra-fast PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe 1.3 interface and is capable of 2,000 MB/s read and 1,750 MB/s write speeds and a maximum of 250,000 random write IOPS.

The P1 is available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. For this review, Crucial sent us the 500GB version of the drive which is capable of delivering up to 1,900 MB/s sequential read and 950 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 90,000 random read and 220,000 random write IOPS.

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the P1 has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Crucial's new PCIe NVMe SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the P1 have what it takes? More importantly, is it the best bang for your buck? Keep reading as we find out.