With the latest QLC (Quad-Level Cell) NAND, Micron is aiming towards lowering the costs, having higher capacities and at the same time by switching to SSDs in servers and consumer machines we can lower the overall footprint of the said PCs. The Crucial P1 model we are going to take a look upon today is using NVMe protocol over PCIe and can be found online for as low as 79 Euros (500GB capacity).

Our sample has arrived a little beat-up “thanks” to the couriers, but thankfully the hardware did not suffer any damages; the product is shipped inside a small cardboard enclosure, that mentions the name of the product, along with the total storage capacity:

On the back side, we will be able to take a look at some online resources, but also check out the product serial number:

The P1 is further secured inside a transparent plastic mold and is offered with some documentation as well:

The said documentation redirects the user to online resources, in multiple languages, for the initial setup:

The drive is offered in a 2280 format and presents itself with a large sticker in the front; here we will find out about the power rating, the BUS it is running on, the internal code name, serial number, current running firmware and more:

The back side of the PCB is blank, but populated on the models with higher capacity (it is available up to 2TB):

By removing the factory sticker, we will reveal two NAND chips, a DRAM cache but also the main controller:

P1 does house a Silicon Motion SM2263EN NVMe controller, that supports a PCIe 3 x4 BUS, up to 8 NAND Flash channels, does have DRAM support for caching and can deliver up to 3500MB/s reads and 3000MB/s writes (depending on the chosen NAND)

The D9SHD is a Micron DRAM DDR3L chip, with a 512MB capacity:

The NAND packages do carry a NW946 marking, which describes a 64-layer quad-level cell chip; the chips are 256GB in size, totaling about 500GB of storage if we do eliminate the overprovisioning. These chips do also have SLC cache embedded, in order to maintain high write speeds for longer, when working with large files. This new technology has some drawbacks as well, like lower endurance versus TLC, MLC and SLC (the write endurance is 100TB, that equals to about 54GB of data during five years of warranty) and that the performance starts to drop as soon as the drive gets filled up: