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.
With the 2TB P310 2230 SSD we tested previously, the temperatures hovered around 41 ºC while idle and would climb up to 83 ºC when pushed hard. At this point, Adaptive Thermal Protection would kick in and throttle the drive's performance.
As you can see above, the 500GB P310 2280 SSD doesn't get nearly as hot. At idle, the drive's temperature averaged about 33 ºC. Under heavy loads, the drive reached temperatures as high as 72 ºC when reading and 62 ºC when writing. With the temperatures staying well below 80 ºC, there was no sign of thermal throttling.
Final Thoughts:
The Crucial P310 2280 is a great choice for the consumer, professional or gamer looking for a fast, yet affordable, PCIe Gen4 SSD for their desktop or laptop computer. This compact, M.2 form factor SSD is powered by Phison's DRAM-less 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 NVMe's Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature and a PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 2.0 interface and you have a drive capable of transferring data, in some cases, at nearly twice the speed of Gen3 NVMe SSDs. In our sequential read and write tests, the 500GB version of the P310 was able to read at speeds as high as 6,763 MB/s and write at speeds in excess of 3,700 MB/s. It also did surprisingly well in our random write tests, producing nearly 244,000 IOPS at low queue depths.
The Crucial P310 2280 is available now in 500, 1TB and 2TB capacities. Prices on Amazon.com start at $50 for the 500GB drive reviewed here and go up to $140 for the 2TB version.
Highs:
- Available in 500GB, 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
- Good sequential read performance
- Excellent random read and write performance
- Small 2280 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:
- Write speed on 500GB is half that of higher capacities
- Lower endurance than many TLC NAND-based SSDs
