Adaptive Thermal Protection:
While PCIe SSDs like the P5 Plus offer impressive performance, they also generate a good amount of heat. To keep them from overheating, Crucial has implemented what they call Adaptive Thermal Protection. This technology monitors the temperature of a drive and will automatically reduce its performance when it reaches a certain point.
While not the hottest SSD we've looked at, the P310 can get get a bit toasty. At idle, temperatures hovered around 41 ºC. When pushed hard, the drive reached temperatures as high as 81 ºC when reading and 83 ºC when writing. When the P310's temperature reached about 81 ºC, Adaptive Thermal Protection would kick in and throttle its performance.
Using my motherboard's M.2 SSD heatsink, the P310's temperature hovered around 34 ºC at idle. This time around, the drive reached temperatures as high as 57 ºC when reading and 60 ºC when writing and there was also no sign of thermal throttling.
Final Thoughts:
Crucial's P310 SSD is an excellent choice for the handheld console gamer looking to expand the size of their gaming library while boosting performance for faster load times. This diminutive drive is powered by Phison's DRAM-less PS5027-E27T controller and is available with up to 2TB of Micron's 232-layer QLC NAND flash. Combine this with Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology and a PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 2.0 interface and you have one of the fastest 2230 M.2 form factor SSDs on the market today. In our sequential read and write tests, the 2TB version of the P310 was able to read at speeds as high as 7,224 MB/s and write at speeds in excess of 6,300 MB/s. It also did surprisingly well in our random write tests, producing nearly 250,000 IOPS at low queue depths
The Crucial P310 is available now in 1TB and 2TB capacities and can be purchased through retailers like Amazon for $115 and $205, respectively.
Highs:
- Available in 1TB and 2TB capacities
- PCIe 4.0 x4 interface with NVMe 2.0 protocol
- Phison PS5027-E27T controller
- Equipped with Micron 232-layer QLC NAND
- Very good sequential and random read and write performance
- Small 2230 M.2 form factor
- Dynamic Write Acceleration
- Supports Redundant Array of Independent NAND and Multistep Data Integrity Algorithms
- Full hardware-based encryption
- Supports TRIM and active garbage collection
- Thermal and power loss protection
- Includes Acronis True Image cloning software
- 5 year warranty
Lows:
- Gets hot under heavy workloads
- Lower endurance than many TLC NAND-based SSDs
