Crucial P1 1TB
More gigs, less quids
SSD whose spark is worse than its byte
SOLID-STATE DRIVE ❘ £102 from Amazon www.snipca.com/32924
As SSD speeds zoom beyond the old SATA interface and the 2.5in hard-drive format that went along with it, the new way to fit solid-state storage in your PC is on a little bare circuit board that uses the NVME standard to connect to the motherboard through an M.2 socket. Some of these drives are already incredibly fast, shifting more than 3GB of data per second – equivalent to copying a terabyte of data (1000GB) in five minutes, or, often more importantly, handling heavy data streams in real time without stuttering.
Not all SSDS are that fast, and most aren’t that big: 256GB (a quarter of a gigabyte) is common, because higher capacities haven’t been affordable. This 1TB NVME drive from Crucial, the popular brand owned by US chip maker Micron, shows that’s changing. For just over a hundred quid, it promises respectable speeds of 2000MB/S (two gigabytes per second) reading and 1700MB/S writing.
In our tests it only managed 1,781 and 1,438MB/S, which isn’t bad, but trickier tasks like copying very small files halved these speeds again. It also has a relatively unimpressive endurance rating of 200 terabytes written. For most users, though, this is still a pretty fast drive that’ll last years, and a huge upgrade over any hard drive.
Because of how SSDS work, drives with higher capacities within the same product range commonly go faster, and the P1 certainly follows that pattern. So although there’s a 500GB version, and as you’d expect it costs a bit more than half the price (£65 from Amazon www. snipca.com/32926), its quoted write speed is only 950MB/S. That’s still comfortably faster than mechanical drives, but not such good value.
You could get higher performance from something like Samsung’s 970 Evo Plus (£198 from Amazon www.snipca. com/32928, see our review, Issue 552, page 26), but it’ll cost you. On a limited budget, and assuming you don’t need maximum speed for a specialist purpose like high-end video editing, it makes more sense to invest in reasonable speed and higher capacity.