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Crucial P3 Plus 4TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 SSD Review

Storage/SSD by stefan @ 2023-07-23

The P3 Plus 4TB drive from Crucial is a good product to consider when aiming mostly at high-capacity and less on the speed, performing well as a mainstream drive. We noted that it does not get as hot as its 2TB counterpart but does still require placement in a well-ventilated chassis and covered by a heatsink provided by the computer motherboard. Using such drive in a laptop will surely max out the temperatures and besides a shorter lifespan, the drive will also perform less than desired, due to throttling.

Introduction

At first we would like to thank Crucial for sending a sample of their P3 Plus 4TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 SSD for testing and reviewing.

About Crucial:

“Looking for computer memory or a new storage drive? You've come to the right place!

Crucial is a global brand of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the largest memory and flash storage manufacturers in the world. We make computer memory upgrades (DRAM) and solid state drives (SSDs), and offer more than 250,000 upgrades for over 50,000 systems. For 17 years, we've sought to provide the Crucial Difference — award-winning products, outstanding support, and a team of memory and storage experts who explain complex lingo in everyday terms. We're here to help improve the performance of your system.

Crucial memory and SSDs have been qualified and approved by major original equipment manufacturers, and every single module that leaves our doors has been rigorously tested at the component and module level. That's a big deal in the memory industry, but it's not all. When it comes to our SSDs, each drive undergoes over a thousand hours of prerelease validation testing and hundreds of qualification tests to ensure optimal reliability and performance.

To find upgrades in just a few clicks, our award-winning Crucial System Scanner or Crucial Memory Advisor™ tool will identify compatible upgrades for your system, and if you order on Crucial.com, we guarantee compatibility — or your money back. With fast and free shipping, outstanding tech support, and an exhaustive library of articles, videos, and install guides, we make it easy to find and install the right upgrade for your system.

Let us be your memory and storage experts.”

Comment from jmke @ 2023/07/26

hey Stefan,

during Amazon sales I bought a Crucial P3 (none plus) 4TB NVMe drive
installed in a machine with PCI NVMe slot, have a few other SSD SATA and NVMe Samsung drives also around.

What you experienced here:

is exactly what I saw too; also take a look at the drive activity in task manager when you see this sharp drop in performance.

like you had here

Thi is because Crucial is using: Micron 176 Layer 3D QLC NAND – Quadruple-Level-Cell ;
in order of performance , SSD Cells
SLC > MLC > QLC/QLC

the P3 and P3 Plus have NO dedicated DRAM cache, they will first write data first level SLC, once that is filled , will start going in the QLC and this is where you see the huge performance drop AND a huge increase in response times (3000ms+) and the disk I/O is at 100%. And this during a simple sequential write action.

My 10 year old SATA150 HDD has higher sequential write speeds than this NVMe SSD!

and once that I/O is at 100%, FULL system hang.
This drive should never be used as an OS Disk; and even as a scratch/data disk, seeing the performance drop; cannot really recommend it.

the 2TB Crucial P3 Plus is at €99 at Amazon.de
Samsung 970 Evo 2TB NVMe is at €98 at same shop

and that is a complete no brainer; the Samsung EVO 970 hold consistent NVMe PCI express levels of performance, not seeing ANY drops in performance as stellar as this Crucial one and I/O activity remains lower and latency is at <1ms, instead of 2000-3000ms I see with the Crucial NVMe

this is one drive to avoid imho

Comment from jmke @ 2023/07/26

here is somebody with the exact same experience with Crucial P3 Plus

https://www.digitec.ch/en/page/why-i...this-ssd-25853

Quote:

A quarter of the storage volume – that’s 250 GB in the case of my test sample – can be written with 1 bit in the fast, single-level cell mode (SLC). Once these are used up, the disk switches back to QLC mode. SSDs use a trick here. Namely, if SLC mode is exhausted and no large write operations are pending, they shovel the data into the QLC memory. This should free up a quarter of the available memory for SLC mode. As my test shows, this only works to a limited extent on the Crucial P3 Plus.

Here, too, the P3 Plus falls short. When the SSD is empty, the transfer speed is 1.5 GB/s on average, and it doesn’t throttle at any point. This is a decent value.

However, my further tests reveal a big problem with the P3 Plus. I delete all data from the SSD and repeat the test with twice the amount of data, i.e. 138 GB, by creating copies of the movies on the system drive. I repeat the latter step until the P3 Plus starts throttling. Shortly after the start of the third round – with around 250 GB of total data written so far – the SSD throttles to an average of 70 MB/s.

Comment from jmke @ 2023/07/26

my experience in one picture:

80Mb/s max write speeds;
Latency spikes, activity at 100%

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