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

Product Information

The Crucial P3 Plus is an NVMe PCIe Gen4 SSD designed for mainstream consumers looking for an everyday budget drive. The P3 Plus supports the usual advanced feature-set, including dynamic write acceleration and redundant array of independent NAND (RAIN), TRIM support, ECC and adaptive thermal protection. The Crucial P3 Plus offers by far the best value, although it doesn't come with a heatsink and is a hair below Sony's speed recommendations - although even significantly slower SSDs worked fine in our testing. We are reviewing the 4TB version of the Crucial P3 Plus drive and will be comparing it to the following NVME QLC SSDs:

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. 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. Each SQL Server VM is configured with two vDisks: 100GB volume for boot and a 500GB volume for the database and log files. From a system resource perspective, we configured each VM with 16 vCPUs, 64GB of DRAM and leveraged the LSI Logic SAS SCSI controller. While our Sysbench workloads tested previously saturated the platform in both storage I/O and capacity, the SQL test is looking for latency performance. All of these tests leverage the common vdBench workload generator, with a scripting engine to automate and capture results over a large compute testing cluster. This allows us to repeat the same workloads across a wide range of storage devices, including flash arrays and individual storage devices. Our testing process for these benchmarks fills the entire drive surface with data, then partitions a drive section equal to 1% of the drive capacity to simulate how the drive might respond to application workloads. This is different than full entropy tests which use 100% of the drive and take them into a steady state. As a result, these figures will reflect higher-sustained write speeds.

Some of the storage capacity is used for formatting and other purposes and is not available for data storage. 1GB equals 1 billion bytes. Not all capacities available at initial launch. In terms of performance, this SSD can handle intensive workloads, with a write volume of 150 TBW. This makes it a reliable choice for demanding users. The high read and write speeds provided by the PCIe 4.0 bus mean fast system start-up and application loading. Data transfer is seamless. Energy Savings, High Storage, Minimal Latency

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. The Maxio MAP1602 is a fast, DRAM-less controller that we first saw on the Acer Predator GM7. Although that drive originally came with YMTC’s 2nd generation 128-Layer TLC, there was speculation that it could come with the newer 232-Layer TLC. Lexar would not officially confirm the latter on the NM790, but testing suggests that’s what is on this drive. This flash competes with Micron’s 232-Layer TLC, which so far has been mostly going to PCIe 5.0 SSDs. On the bright side, the P3 Plus is very good at recovering its pSLC cache given sufficient idle time. Leaving some data in the cache can be beneficial for future reads on newly-written data. In fact, this is a tactic utilized by the upcoming P41 Plus when it’s less full, although that discussion is to be left for another time. With the P3 Plus it does seem that Crucial tries to strike a reasonable balance but it’s definitely not as consistent as drives with TLC. Power Consumption and Temperature 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. 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 Year of the Rabbit Brings a Svelte SSD.

The P3 and P3 Plus SSDs are PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 successors, respectively, to the Crucial P2. We were not fans of the P2, especially when Crucial later switched to QLC from TLC. However, we imagine it probably sold well due to its availability, pricing, and varied capacity options. 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 would also drive home to people that do not regularly transfer large files that they will be experiencing the peak performance almost all the time rather than the saturated performance. We can estimate that a hard drive could extract an update at an average write speed of 50 MB/s and read speed of 200 MB/s. At this rate, a hard disk drive would take 1.5 minutes to extract 6 GB of files during the game update. 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. In 64K sequential writes, the P3 Plus actually had solid performance placing 1 st among the tested drives. Here, it posted a peak score of 65K IOPS or 4.1GB/s at a latency of 237µs.

NVMe SSD driver for Windows OS

But I will say that in my experience, drives that have higher steady state numbers don't tend to feel slower over time, particularly as they get filled up. It's one of the reasons I really dislike QLC drives. I have yet to use one in any long-term scenario where I end up thinking, "This is fine." Take a 2TB QLC, put 1.5TB of data on it, and on a lot of drives they'll start feeling more like a moderately fast HDD than an SSD!

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.Next, we looked at our VDI benchmarks, which are designed to tax the drives even further. These tests include Boot, Initial Login, and Monday Login. Starting with Boot, the Crucial P3 Plus had a peak of 43,734 IOPS with a latency of 790µs, which was once again well behind the rest of the QLC drives. 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 The Crucial P3 Plus found itself at the bottom of the leaderboard in virtually all of our tests (the exception was sequential writes, where it was first place with 4.1GB/s). But to be fair, even categorizing the drive is tough. Without Crucial disclosing the NAND used, we initially started testing this drive as a standard TLC drive, which yielded devastating results. Once we dug into the components to find it uses QLC NAND, we ran our lighter SSD testing protocol, which was still pretty poor. bazoka1945 said:which lexar did you have and how much temp c thank you :)The part number was LNM610P002T-RNNNG. I don't recall what the peak temperature was but the thing clearly had something wrong with it because it was idling at 62°C. I seem to remember the temperature going into the mid 70s but I'm not 100% certain. It was CrystalDiskInfo that first alerted me to the problem.