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

Product Information

When it comes to benchmarking storage devices, application testing is best, and synthetic testing comes in second place. While not a perfect representation of actual workloads, synthetic tests do help to baseline storage devices with a repeatability factor that makes it easy to do apples-to-apples comparison between competing solutions. These workloads offer a range of different testing profiles ranging from “four corners” tests, common database transfer size tests, to trace captures from different VDI environments. 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.

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. 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).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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. During gameplay, games seldom write to your storage device. However, game files are written to your storage device during installation and game patches.The Crucial P3 Plus PCIe Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSD is equipped with a Phison PS5021-E21T controller and is available in capacities ranging from 512GB to 4TB. This was the first drive we’ve seen from the company since the uneven Crucial P5 Plus over a year ago, so we were hoping to see a better showing from Crucial’s latest release. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, as it yielded some disappointing results in more ways than one.

So the P3 Plus is no barn burner among NVMe SSDs. It still seeks 10 times faster than SATA SSDs, and reads and writes dozens of times faster than any hard drive. It’s fast—it’s just not as fast as others in the benchmarks.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. Our VDI Initial Login produced some messy results in our charts. While the P3 Plus topped out at 32,608 IOPS, it took then took a steep spike in performance, ending the test at 17,359 IOPS with a latency of 1,723.6ms for last place. 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.

Why? Well, past news coverage of the drive indicates it has the more cost-effective, less powerful QLC NAND; though Crucial shies away from mentioning this on any of its current marketing–including the reviewer’s guide and official spec sheet. 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. 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. 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. 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.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. This lifespan value is an estimate of how long the SSD will last. Various factors can impact the actual lifespan, but lifespan estimates indicate how long you can expect the SSD to last. It's important to note that these values are estimates and can be affected by various factors such as usage patterns, environmental conditions, and other factors. Nonetheless, we feel these lifespan estimates provide a good indication of the duration you can expect the SSD to last before it starts showing signs of wear and tear. 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 ).