Crucial P310 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe 2230 M.2 Solid State Drive

Model: Crucial P310 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe 2230 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.

Crucial recently introduced its latest Gen4 NVMe SSD, the P310. Designed for use in ultrathin laptops, mini PCs and handheld gaming consoles like the Valve Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally, this M.2 2230 form factor drive is powered by Phison's PS5027-E27T controller and is available with up to 2TB of Micron's industry-leading 232-layer QLC NAND flash. The P310 also includes features like dynamic write acceleration, adaptive thermal protection and integrated power loss immunity and is equipped with an ultra-fast PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 2.0 interface to deliver up to 7,100 MB/s read and 6,000 MB/s write speeds.

The P310 is available in 1TB and 2TB capacities. For this review, Crucial sent us the 2TB version of the drive, which is capable of delivering up to 7,100 MB/s sequential read and 6,000 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 1,200K random read and write IOPS.

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the P310 has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Crucial's new 2330 form factor SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the P310 have what it takes? Can it deliver the performance and features that we've come to expect from Crucial?  Keep reading as we find out.

The P310 comes in a small, blue and white box. Along with a picture of the drive, the packaging advertises a number of its key features including its 2TB capacity, support for PCIe Gen4 NVMe technology, maximum read speed, 5 year warranty and that it's intended for use with gaming consoles and laptops. Inside, you'll find the P310 as well as a small guide with information on where you can get additional help and download the migration and cloning software.

Physical Features:

The P310 uses the 2230 form factor for M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. It measures 30mm x 22mm x 2.3mm and tips the scales at a mere 2.6g. The drive also has an "M key" edge connector which provides PCIe SSDs with up to 4x lanes of bandwidth.

The P310 is one of the first drives to use Phison's PS5027-E27T controller. Manufactured using TSMC 12nm process technology, this DRAM-less, PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 2.0 controller is powered by a single-core ARM Cortex R5 processor and has 4 NAND channels with 16 chip enables (CE) per channel. The E27T also offers support for up to 8TB of 3D TLC/QLC NAND flash and features end-to-end data path protection, hardware-based encryption and Phison's fifth generation low-density parity-check (LDPC) and RAID ECC algorithms for improved drive reliability.

For the 2TB version of the P310, Crucial opted to use Micron's 232-Layer QLC NAND flash. If you'd remove the label, you'd see that there is a single 2TB NAND flash package on top of the PCB. There is also no DRAM cache chip as the P310's controller takes full advantage of NVMe's Host Memory Buffer feature by using a small portion of the computer's memory to cache the mapping tables.

The test system used in this review is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 9 7900x CPU, Gigabyte B650E AORUS master motherboard, 32GB (16GB x 2) of Corsair Vengeance 5200MT/s DDR5 memory, Samsung 990 Pro 2TB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I used the latest version of Windows 11. 

To test the performance of Crucial's P310 SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, 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 Crucial T705, Silicon Power US75, Samsung 990 EVO, Silicon Power PX10, Crucial T500, ADATA SE920, ADATA LEGEND 970, Crucial T700, Solidigm P44 Pro, Samsung 990 PRO, ADATA LEGEND 960, Crucial P3 Plus, 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, Crucial X10 Pro, Crucial X9 Pro, ADATA Elite SE880, Kingston XS2000, ADATA XPG ATOM 30, Samsung 980, Silicon-Power UD70, Crucial P2, SK hynix Gold P31 and Crucial P5.

As I mentioned earlier, the P310 uses Phison's PS5027-E27T controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.

CrystalDiskMark 8.0.5:

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 P310 is capable of reading at 7,100 MB/s and writing at 6,000 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 P310 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 4,215 MB/s and write at more than 5,900 MB/s.

ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01:

I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the P310's 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 P310 2TB

Crucial T500 with Heatsink 1TB

When tested with ATTO, the P310's read speeds topped out at about 6.86 GB/s and its write speeds at 6.30 GB/s.

AS SSD:

AS SSD is a benchmark designed specifically for solid state drives. The application contains five synthetic tests used to determine the sequential and random read and write performance of a drive.

Crucial P310 2TB

Crucial T500 with Heatsink 1TB

AS SSD also includes a copy benchmark. This test copies an ISO (two large files), program (many small files), and game (small and large files),  returning the speed and duration of each.

Crucial P310 2TB

Crucial T500 with Heatsink 1TB

HD Tune Pro 5.75:

Next, I ran a series of tests using HD Tune Pro. This hard disk utility measures a drive's performance by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its access time, burst rate and CPU usage. For this review, I'm also going to use it to benchmark the P310's random read and write speeds, random access times and the number of operations per second.

Crucial P310 2TB - Read Benchmark

Crucial T500 with Heatsink 1TB - Read Benchmark

Crucial P310 2TB - Write Benchmark

Crucial T500 with Heatsink 1TB - Write Benchmark

The P310 performed fairly well when benchmarked with HD Tune. The drive had average read and write speeds of 6104.8 MB/s and 5830.8 MB/s, respectively.

Crucial P310 2TB - Random Access Read

Crucial T500 with Heatsink 1TB - Random Access Read

Crucial P310 2TB - Random Access Write

Crucial T500 with Heatsink 1TB - Random Access Write

When reading 4KB blocks, the P310 reached 71,746 IOPS and had an average speed of 280.259 MB/s. The drive was even faster when writing, reaching 83,640 IOPS with an average speed of 326.719 MB/s.

Anvil's Storage Utilities:

Anvil's Storage Utilities is another benchmark designed with SSDs in mind. The standard storage benchmark measures a drive's performance by testing its transfer speeds, access times and IOPS.

Iometer:

Lastly, I ran a series of tests using Iometer. This tool can be configured to benchmark a number of things. In this case, I used it to measure the P310's read and write speeds and the number of operations per second. The tests were run using random bytes and a queue depth of 3.

The P310's performance was very similar to what we saw in our other tests. The drive was able to read at 6842.86 MB/s and write at 6036.76 MB/s.

The P310 also performed very well when doing random reads and writes. In our tests, the drive was able to read at 474.14 MB/s and write at 975.85 MB/s.

According to Crucial, the 2TB P310 is capable of 1,200K IOPS when reading and writing 4K blocks. With two threads and a queue depth of three, the drive reached 121,381 random read IOPS and 249,819 random write IOPS.

As with most drives, the P310 performed better with more threads and at higher queue depths. With sixteen threads and the queue depth set to 32, it reached 1,130,078 random read IOPS and 1,060,630 random write IOPS. 

PCMark 8 - Storage Test:

PCMark 8 is a complete benchmark for Windows. It includes five benchmark tests, each designed around a specific scenario. The storage benchmark measures drive performance using real-world traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games.

PCMark 10 - Full System Drive Benchmark:

PCMark 10's Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. This benchmark produces an overall score as a measure of drive performance. Comparing devices is as simple as comparing scores. The tests also measure and report the bandwidth and average access time performance for the drive.

The P310 performed surprisingly well for a DRAM-less drive. As you can see, it wasn't nearly as fast as the Crucial T705 or ADATA LEGEND 970.  However, it scored better than other PCIe 4.0 SSDs like the Crucial T500 and Samsung 990 PRO.

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