Crucial P5 2TB NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD Review

The Crucial P5 Series is marketed as their fastest and most innovative Solid State Drive (SSD) product to date, pushing the capabilities of PCIe Gen 3 NVMe.

In yet another first for the company, this SSD features a new controller designed completely in-house. Let's take a look.

The Crucial P5 SSD is available in four different capacities, 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and this 2TB model — retail pricing direct from Crucial is currently $54.99, $79.99, $119.96 and $271.96 respectively.

Performance ratings on the Crucial P5 Series vary slightly based on drive model. More specifically, the lowest capacity of 250GB is quoted to deliver a Sequential Write of 1400MB/s, where as the 500GB, 1TB and 2TB all offer Sequential Write performance of 3000MB/s.

Regardless of which model you choose, all four P5 models share the same the Sequential Read performance quoted to deliver 3400MB/s in addition to high-performance benefits of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe).

The Crucial P5 2TB SSD is a single sided M.2 2280 form-factor drive using PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe interfacing.

By utilizing a NVMe host controller interface and Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) bus, this direct connection overcomes the constraints associated with fast flash-based storage colliding with legacy data transport technologies such as Serial ATA (SATA).

To put this in perspective, I typically explain it as such. Third-generation SATA has an effective transfer speed of 600MB/s (6.0 Gbit/s). Using the SATA III interface with a SATA SSD will produce Read/Write speeds in the neighborhood of 550MB/s. PCI Express devices can support 1x, 4x, 8x, or 16x lanes. Since PCIe 3.0 has an effective transfer speed of 985MB/s per lane in each direction, the potential transfer speeds are up to 15.76GB/s. However, most M.2 for PCIe SSDs support between 2x and 4x lanes, which translates a maximum transfer speed closer to 3940MB/s (31.5Gbit/s or 3.94GB/s).

Crucial's P5 Series is the first consumer grade Solid State Drive to use their new NVMe SSD controller designed in-house by parent company Micron. Peeling back the sticker exposes this rather large Micron DM01B2 controller, a Micron branded LPDDR4 DRAM chip (MT53D512M32D2DS-046 IT:D) and two Micron NW970 TLC NAND Flash packages (MT29F8T08ESLCEG4-R:C TR).

For those interested in a Flash component technical deep dive the related datasheets are searchable by FBGA Code or Part Number on the Micron website.

The Crucial P5 2TB model has a calculated Life Expectancy or Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) of 1.8 million hours. This equates to 0.329 Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) or 657.534 Gigabytes written per day (GB/day) for 5 years, which in turn is backed by a limited five-year warranty.

Features

Highlight summary:

• Capable of full hardware-based encryption
• Dynamic write acceleration
• Redundant Array of Independent NAND (RAIN)
• Multistep Data Integrity Algorithms
• Integrated Power Loss Immunity
• Active Garbage Collection / TRIM Support
• NVMe standard Self-Monitoring and Reporting Technology (SMART)
• NVMe Autonomous Power State Transition (APST)
• 5 year limited warranty
• Free shipping

Specifications

• Type: M.2 2280 (single sided)
• Height: 22mm x 80mm
• Flash Controller: Micron DM01B2
• Flash Type: Micron TLC NAND
• Interface: NVMe/PCIe Gen3 x4
• Temperature: Operating (0°C to 70°C) Non-operating (-40°C to 85°C)
• Acoustics: 0dB
• Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): 1.8 million hours
• Total Bytes Written (TBW): 1200TB

Performance

Performance testing was done under Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS (Focal Fossa). Factors affecting performance include: Capacity of the drive, interface of the host and overall system performance. Your results may vary.

The Crucial P5 SSD is capable of full hardware-based encryption. By enabling this feature the built-in controller is used as a compute resource with no performance penalty. However, for SSD benchmarks we leave this feature disabled.

Test System

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 1700X Eight-Core @ 3.40GHz (8 Cores / 16 Threads)
• Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX X570-F GAMING
• Memory: 64GB DDR4
• OS: Ubuntu 20.04
• Kernel: 5.4.0-56-generic (x86_64)
• Interface: PCIe Gen3 x4
• SSD Firmware Version: P4CR311

We have revised how our SSD benchmarking is performed and no longer benchmark the drive while in a Fresh-Out-of-Box (FOB) state. FOB typically is how manufactures specify I/O performance in advertising because the drive has yet to endure any sustained workload and initial performance benchmarks from a FOB state will result in uncharacteristically high measurements.

To provide more accurate measurements we precondition the drive to a Steady state before running our benchmarks. Steady state is achieved by issuing a set of random and sequential preconditioning operations. Though this process takes several hours, the benchmark results are more consistent and produce real-world values.

Advertised performance

• Model: CT2000P5SSD8
• Sequential Read: 3400 MB/s
• Random Read: 430,000 IOPS
• Sequential Write: 3000 MB/s
• Random Write: 500,000 IOPS

Sequential Reads compared to Random Reads with Identical Block Sizes

Sequential Writes compared to Random Writes with Identical Block Sizes

4K Random Read Performance with Varying Queue Depths

4K Random Write Performance with Varying Queue Depth

Timings of device Reads

This measurement is an indication of how fast the drive can sustain sequential data reads under Linux, without any filesystem overhead. Timing buffered disk reads: 5684 MB in  3.00 seconds = 1894.08 MB/sec.