Judging by the transfer speeds, we are dealing with a decent mainstream SSD at quite low sale prices, thanks to the newer QLC technology. As we have seen before with TLC SSDs, the P1 does rely on the RAM cache and SLC cache for delivering higher read/write performance but as soon as this fills up, the overall speeds will drop. The performance drop will be mostly visible when we do write very large files to the drive at once, a scenario not frequently found when used in consumer workstations.

One of the workarounds for avoiding the performance drop scenario when writing continuous streams of data is to purchase a higher capacity model, such as the 1TB or 2TB one, that also includes more SLC cache.

In order to check out the write behavior on the blank drive (full SLC cache available), we have performed a test that shows how the drive acts up when data is being continuously transferred to it:

The P1 is ideal to be used in consumer laptops, compact media centers or even desktop computers, if you are not very picky and do require sustained write performance. The drive can be found online for about 79 Euros (500GB version), 157 Euros for the 1TB drive but also 499 Euros for the 2TB drive.

Crucial P1 500GB M.2 Type 2280 SSD is Recommended for:

We would like to thank again to Micron for making this review possible!