Crucial isn’t one of the mainstream SSDs that you would be hearing every day. Although, they have been making and selling SSDs for quite some time now. This time around, Crucial aims at the enthusiast market with their latest release of the Crucial P5 m.2 NVMe SSD. This features a Micron 96L 512Gbit TLC flash and in-house controller design.
[table id=17 /]
The Crucial P5 comes in a well-packaged box with installation guides, and free access to the Crucial Storage Executive Tool and Acronis True Image for Crucial software suite.
Going over to the Crucial P5 drive, it is a single-sided M.2 2280 form factor driver that works on a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. The PCB is completely black with a minimalist label on the front. It does not come with any conductive materials. This only shows that Crucial is reliant on the adaptive thermal protection to optimize for performance and stability.
At the rear, there are no components but we see information about the drive and its firmware on the label provided. The Crucial P5 series supports full hardware based-drive encryption too.
SOFTWARE
The Crucial Storage Executive software comes free and available for download for those who deem it necessary.
Benchmarks
AS SSD Benchmark
With our recent reviews, we have ran AS SSD and based on the scores, the Crucial P5 1TB has not met their rated sequential read and writes which is at 3,400 MB/s and 3,000 MB/s respectively.
AS SSD Compression Benchmark
On this graph, it would be ideal to see a straight line as the lines drop, it results in compression performance loss as the test results from 0% compressible to 100% compressible data. The Crucial P5 1TB drive showed staggering results on both reads and writes.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
The ATTO Disk Benchmark is one of the frequently used benchmark software and utilizes RAW or compressible data.
Crucial P5 comes close to their rated speeds of 3000 MB/s Write speeds but fell short on their read speeds only resulting in around 2.63 GB/s.
Crystal Disk Mark
Crystal Disk Mark is for measuring read and write performance through random data which is incompressible. Performance is identically, regardless of the data sample.
From the benchmarks results, we find the Crucial P5 1TB meeting and surpassing both Sequential Read and Sequential rating in the Peak Performance but fell short on the real-world performance. The same goes for the random read and write tests.
PCMARK 8 Storage 2.0
PCMark 8 Storage test suite creates testing scenarios that a user would normally experience.
Here, we are shown an explosive performance by the Crucial P5 going head-to-head with most SSDs.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
The Crucial P5 1TB is a great choice of an SSD. It is aesthetically minimalist and great packaging along with their complimentary software that supports everything you need to monitor and check your drive. Hardware encryption comes as a bonus for security-woes.
In terms of performance, the P5 showed a rather wobbly result. Though it is still fast for its current speed might not be enough for demanding enthusiasts.
In terms of overall user experience, the P5 delivers can be a great alternative to the XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB, Samsung 970 EVO Plus, and Firecuda 510. We have reason to believe that Crucial’s first completely in-house NVMe SSD would be a great fit for most consumers with its great speeds but will depend on the workload. Not to mention, it includes a 5-year warranty for peace of mind.