Crucial P2 500GB PCIe M.2 Solid State Drive

Model: Crucial P2 500GB 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.

Earlier this year, Crucial added two new PCIe SSDs to its product lineup. In addition to the high-performance P5, the company launched a new entry-level model, the P2. Built for value-conscious customers looking for a fast, yet affordable, SSD, this M.2 form factor drive is powered by Phison's PS5013-E13T controller and offers features like Dynamic Write Acceleration, Redundant Array of Independent NAND (RAIN), multistep data integrity algorithms and adaptive thermal protection. The P2 is also available with up to 2TB of Micron's 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash and is equipped with ultra-fast PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe 1.3 interface to deliver up to 2,400 MB/s read and 1,900 MB/s write speeds.

The P2 is available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. For this review, Crucial sent us the 500GB version of the drive which is capable of delivering up to 2,300 MB/s sequential read and 940 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 95,000 random read and 215,000 random write IOPS.

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the P2 has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Crucial's new PCIe SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the P2 have what it takes? More importantly, is it the best bang for your buck? Keep reading as we find out.