Crucial P3 Plus 4TB PCIe 3.0, 3D NAND, NVMe, M.2 SSD, up to 5000MB/s - CT4000P3PSSD8

Product Information

With the new drives Crucial has opted for improved controllers and QLC flash. The goal is still the same - to offer enticing budget drives that cover a wide area, but also excel in a niche. This is why Crucial offers both from 500GB to 4TB. The fastest SSD in this roundup (and the fastest in the PCIe 4.0 category overall, alongside the Samsung 990 Pro), the SN850x doesn't come with a heatsink but scores highly when it comes to load times and overall value.

SSD speed comparison between published Crucial P3 NVMe SSD read/write speeds up to 3500/3000MB/s and published Crucial MX500 SATA SSD read/write speeds of 560/510MB/s; SSD vs. HDD speed comparisons between published Crucial P3 NVMe SSD read/write speeds of up to 3500/3000MB/s and top preset consumer hard disk drive read/write speeds of 7200RPM (~156MB/s). Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. That being said, the P3 Plus is still powered by QLC which has its shortcomings. It’s not going to set records with low queue depth reads or with sustained writes. In fact, the native QLC performance is quite poor. We didn’t expect the drive to match the Platinum P41, but realistically it’s also going to struggle against its direct TLC peers in some rare cases. On the whole it is decidedly average, but all of this can be overlooked if it’s priced right - and especially if you need capacity that won’t break the bank. Looking at SQL Server average latency, the Crucial P3 Plus had an average latency of 8ms placing it near the bottom of the leaderboard.We are reviewing the 4TB version of the Crucial P3 Plus drive and will be comparing it to the following NVME QLC SSDs: We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

At the end of the day, ALL forms of memory are made by Samsung, Hynix or Micron regardless of what brand is stamped on the product. The first time that I bought Silicon Power RAM, I had never heard of them before but, since I knew that it had to be made by one of the above 3 companies, I honesty didn't care what brand it was. The P3 Plus performed surprisingly well, buoyed by its aggressively large SLC cache and many improvements to the QLC flash. Newer DRAM-less drives simply blow the old technology out of the water, which doesn’t hurt either. The drive is also incredibly efficient and cool-running which puts it in a good spot for laptops and the PS5. The warranty period is a solid five years and Crucial has sufficient software support. All of this is good news, particularly if you’re looking for an affordable 4TB SSD. It is unsurprising that the P3 Plus does quite well at QD256 with 4KB random reads. Maximum IOPS may not be a realistic metric, at least while we wait on DirectStorage, but the results demonstrate that new hardware is easily surpassing the old. Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery Your second question, I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. We show how the drives handle sustained 1MiB writes for 15 minutes, as well as a "zoomed in" 150 seconds view. Then we have a chart that shows the steady state performance at the end of the 15 minutes. It's not meant to be a real-world workload, but just a worst-case sustained writes workload. We note how big it indicates the pSLC cache is on the drive being reviewed, though of course that's for an empty drive.Charting with the data transferred across X rather than time gives an instant visualisation of how much data can be moved in one lump before the drive drops to steady-state performance (e.g. "I move 50GB BD images around, Drive X is slightly faster at peak for 30GB then drops, but Drive Y is a bit slower at peak but will sustain that for 60GB, so is better for my use-case even with a lower peak performance number"). Wall-time before saturation does not give you any meaningful information, because workload duration depends on data-rate and data-size, and you have then only charted one of those rather than both (i.e. you are charting an X axis where the X value is dependant on the Y value rather than independent ).They also claim that the P3 Plus boasts 8.9x faster load times and data transfers compared to traditional SATA drives and is 43% faster than the “fastest Gen3 SSDs.” However, the only information they offer for this claim is the quoted speeds of 5GB/s read and 4.2GB/s write, which you will see in our performance section isn’t the full picture. This means that there will be unsuspecting customers purchasing the P3 thinking it is something that it’s not. It’s a bit baffling as to why they aren’t fully disclosing this information.

The Crucial P3 Plus offers PCI Express 4.0 speed in capacities up to 4GB at an affordable budget price. It makes no pretense of being an elite SSD—if it's high performance you seek, Crucial will gladly sell you a P5 Plus—and its test results were near the bottom of the PCIe 4.0 drives we've reviewed. In fact, in many of our PCMark 10 trace tests of general storage tasks the PCIe 3.0-based Crucial P3 did as well as the P3 Plus or nearly so.Internal drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 64-bit running on an MSI MEG X570/AMD Ryzen 3700X combo with four 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an Asmedia ASM3242 USB 3.2×2 card. Copy tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk using 58GB of the 64GB total memory. Crucial’s performance/NAND claims are where things get a little uncertain. Featuring what it calls Micron Advanced 3D NAND, the company claims that the P3 Plus line is meant for designers, editors, creatives, gamers and professionals with heavy workloads; however, you’d likely want to go for a different, more high-performance drive for use cases like these. This is impressive, is anyone else achieving QLC on charge trap NAND yet? 220 cycles is respectable for a first attempt. NVMe is tested natively through an M.2 to PCIe adapter card in the edge-card slot, while U.2 drives are loaded in the front. The methodology used better reflects end-user workflow with the consistency, scalability, and flexibility testing within virtualized server offers. A large focus is put on drive latency across the entire load range of the drive, not just at the smallest QD1 (Queue-Depth 1) levels. We do this because many of the common consumer benchmarks don’t adequately capture end-user workload profiles. The Crucial P3 speeds of up to 3500/3000MB/s are 1.3x and 1.6x faster (respectively) than Crucial P2 speeds of up to 2400/1900MB/s.