CRUCIAL P3 PLUS

A 1TB Gen4 drive for a good price, but it misses out on award thanks to the cheaper WD Black SN770.

★★★★☆ 1TB, $159 | crucial.com

Although it has a similar name to the Crucial P3, the P3 Plus is a slightly different beast. Here, the drive has been upgraded to a PCI-E Gen4 interface, up from the Gen 3 interface on the standard P3.

Claimed read and write figures have been improved to 5,000MB/sec and 3,000MB/sec respectively. That means the benchmark results are better, although not necessarily by as much as you might expect.

In the AS SSD sequential test, the P3 Plus managed read speeds of 4,267MB/ sec and write speeds of 3,344MB/sec, which puts it well above the P3. Things are closer in the Random test, with the

P3 Plus scoring 2,003MB/sec read speeds and 2,588MB/sec write speeds: only fractionally ahead of the P3.

Turn to the PCMark 10 benchmarks and it’s a similar story: the P3 Plus scored 3,352 in the Data Disk test and a huge 5,238 in the Data Disk test, which is only just behind the WD Black SN770.

As with the P3 and the SN770, the P3 Plus doesn’t have any SDRAM cache, relying on system memory and an SLC cache. For normal tasks, as the PCMark 10 results show, this is a fast SSD.

The downside of the QLC storage used is that endurance is lower than the industry average: here, the 1TB drive has an endurance figure of 220TBW, almost a third of the average of 600TBW. Is that important? Well, if you’re going to use the drive for demanding tasks, such as games or video editing, then possibly; for regular use, this SSD will last the distance.

As with the P3, the drive is also available in 500GB, 2TB and 4TB sizes, alongside the 1TB drive we reviewed here.

Competition at this price is very tough, with the WD Black SN770 not only cheaper for the same capacity, but outdoing the P3 Plus in the benchmarks, as well as offering better endurance. That makes the WD Black SN770 the better choice for most people.

"As with the P3, the drive is also available in 500GB, 2TB and 4TB sizes, alongside the 1TB drive we reviewed here."