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 original P5 Plus, the temperatures hovered around 50 ºC while idle and would climb up to 76 ºC when pushed hard. At this point, Adaptive Thermal Protection would kick in and throttle the drive's performance.
As you'd expect, the heatsink had a big impact on the P5 Plus' temperatures. At idle, the drive's temperature averaged about 39 ºC. Under heavy loads, the drive reached temperatures as high as 62 ºC when reading and 58 ºC when writing. With the temperatures staying well below 76 ºC, there was no sign of thermal throttling.
Final Thoughts:
The heatsink-equipped version of Crucial's P5 Plus SSD is finally here and, like the original, it's a great choice for the gamer or creative professional looking for a fast, yet affordable, PCIe 4.0 SSD for their computer or PlayStation 5 gaming console. Designed and built entirely in-house, this M.2 form factor SSD is powered by Micron's DM01B2 controller and is available with up to 2TB of the company's 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. Combine this with a PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 1.4 interface and you have drive that is nearly twice as fast as Crucial's Gen3 PCIe SSDs. The P5 Plus flew through our sequential transfer rate tests, reading at speeds as high as 6,800 MB/s and writing at more than 5,000 MB/s. The drive also did surprisingly well in our random write tests, producing nearly 212,000 IOPS at low queue depths.
Of course, fast read and write speeds aren't the only things the P5 Plus has to offer. In addition to its integrated heatsink, the drive uses technologies like Dynamic Write Acceleration to optimize performance as well as multistep data integrity algorithms and Redundant Array of Independent NAND (RAIN) to protect data and prevent it from becoming corrupted. The P5 Plus also features thermal and power loss protection, active garbage collection, NVMe Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) support and full hardware-based encryption. To top it all off, the drive is optimized for Microsoft’s DirectStorage API and is covered by a generous 5 year warranty.
The Crucial P5 Plus is available now with the heatsink in 1TB and 2TB capacities and retails for $63 and $123, respectively, on Amazon.com. If you don't need the heatsink, the original P5 Plus can also be picked up for about $10-$20 less.
Highs:
- Integrated heatsink
- Available in 1TB and 2TB capacities
- PCIe 4.0 x4 interface with NVMe protocol
- Micron DM02A1 controller
- Equipped with Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND
- Good sequential and random read and write performance
- Small M.2 2280 form factor
- Large DRAM cache
- 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
- Optimized for Microsoft’s DirectStorage API
- Works with PlayStation 5
- Includes Acronis True Image cloning software
- 5 year warranty
Lows:
- Write speed drops when SLC cache is full
