The test system used in this review is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 3700x CPU, MSI B550 GAMING PLUS motherboard, 16GB (8GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix 3200 MHz DDR4 memory, Crucial P5 1TB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I used the latest version of Windows 10 Pro.
To test the performance of Crucial's P3 Plus SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark. For comparison, I've also included test results from the SK hynix Platinum P41, Silicon Power XS70, WD_BLACK SN770, ADATA XPG ATOM 50, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade, Crucial P5 Plus, Plextor M10PY, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, WD_BLACK SN850, Silicon Power US70, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite, ADATA Elite SE880, Kingston XS2000, ADATA XPG ATOM 30, Samsung 980, Silicon-Power UD70, Crucial P2, SK hynix Gold P31, Crucial P5, ADATA SWORDFISH, ADATA FALCON, Lexar NM610, Silicon Power P34A60, Patriot P300, Plextor M9PG Plus, Plextor M9PY Plus, Crucial X8, ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro, Western Digital WD_BLACK SN750, Samsung 970 EVO Plus, ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, Crucial P1, ADATA XPG SX8200, Western Digital WD_BLACK NVMe, Samsung 970 EVO, Samsung 970 PRO, Plextor M9Pe, Plextor M8Se, Patriot Hellfire, ADATA XPG SX8000, Samsung 960 PRO, Toshiba OCZ RD400, Samsung 950 PRO, ADATA Ultimate SU670, Lexar NQ100, Samsung 870 EVO and Samsung 870 QVO.
As I mentioned earlier, the P3 Plus uses Phison's PS5012-E21T controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that there is a considerable performance difference when reading and writing incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential and random read and write speeds. For this test, we're using the peak and real world profiles.
According to Crucial, the 2TB P3 Plus is capable of reading at 5,000 MB/s and writing at 4,200 MB/s. As you can see, the drive had no problems reaching these speeds in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write tests.
As you'd expect, the P3 Plus wasn't as fast when tested with the "real world" profile which uses a single thread and a much lower queue depth. Nevertheless, it was still able to read at 3,055 MB/s and write at more than 4,300 MB/s.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the P3 Plus' read, write and burst speeds as well as its random access time and CPU usage.
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the P3 Plus had average read and write speeds of 2769.8 MB/s and 2764.1 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 3671.5 MB/s.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the P3 Plus' sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 512B to 64 MB and the total length set to 256MB.
 Crucial P3 Plus 2TB |
 WD_BLACK SN770 1TB |
When tested with ATTO, the P3 Plus' read speeds topped out at about 6.97 GB/s and its write speeds at 5.96 GB/s.
