Crucial P5 Plus SSD 500GB, M.2

Wie schon bei den Modellen mit PCI Express 3.0 veröffentlicht Micron recht spät ein Modell mit der schnelleren Schnittstelle PCI Express 4.0. Andere Marken haben dort schon fast zwei Jahre Vorsprung. Jetzt mit der zweiten Generation der 4.0-SSDs ist schon fast jeder große Hersteller vertreten. Im Gegensatz zum legendären SATA-Modell MX500 fanden die 3.0-Modelle P2 und P5 nicht so richtig ihre Nische auf dem Markt. Ob sich das nun mit der P5 Plus ändern wird? Wir haben ihre Leistung abgeklopft.

Mit der Crucial P5 Plus gelingt der Micron-Marke zwei Jahre nach der Konkurrenz das PCIe-4.0-Debüt und der Anschluss an die Oberklasse der M.2-SSDs für Verbraucher: Das Modell präsentiert sich im Test stark, eine echte Schwäche gibt es nicht. Selbst die Temperatur ist ohne Kühler nur in Extremsituationen ein Thema.

The Crucial P5 Plus is the company's “upgraded” P5 NVMe SSD range. According to Crucial, it's aimed at professionals, creators, gamers, and consumers who want to take advantage of their new Gen4-compatible motherboard. It also has advanced features like Dynamic write acceleration, adaptive heat protection, error correction code, and full-drive encryption capability. Performance-wise it falls somewhere in the middle of the finest PCIe Gen3 and Gen4 drives, although, of course, this is still dependent on the workload and other factors. For a PCIe Gen 4 drive with premium, TLC flash memory rather than QLC flash memory. The Crucial P5 Plus is undoubtedly reasonably priced compared say a WD Black. In terms of relative performance, regardless of how well this drive actually performs, it is undoubtedly good for the peak sequential, with writes in CrystalDiskMark consistently exceeding the 5000~6000 MB/s figure and reads significantly higher at over 6800MB/s. The small queue depth 4K random numbers are a little less exhilarating to see, but still completely fine. The QD1 reads are bounded to roughly 70 MB/s, while the QD1 writes are limited to 185 MB/s. Overall, the drive is a reliable and secure PCIe 4.0 x4 option, which is especially appealing to the many die-hard Crucial enthusiasts who have flocked to it. Of course, to get the best out of it, you'll need a PCIe Gen 4 infrastructure, and at the time of writing, that means a compatible Ryzen processor on, say, a B550 or X570 chipset-based platform. Intel started with PCIe gen 4.0 as well for Z590, Z690 (Alder Lake), etc. This SSD shivers in performance given the right conditions, and for the rest of them, on some workloads, you are down to proper high-end class NVMe performance. Crucial backs the storage unit with a five-year warranty, that or the TBW value reached. Crucial currently provides the drive in three different capacities: 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. The P5 Plus 1TB pretty much occupies the center of the PCIe Gen 4.0 pack for the majority of our testing, which is fine with us because when the P5 Plus was called upon to perform admirably in the most critical and crucial situations (pardon the pun). The only area where this drive could be better is in the area of heavy file writes, that situation where the cache becomes saturated and the underlying pure TLC NAND performance is writing directly. But we're inclined to say that you'll very likely never even notice a significant loss in performance, but anyone considering purchasing this gear should be aware of these limits. In the end, we feel the Crucial P5 Plus is a worthy successor to the P5 and provides the PCIe 4.0 advancement that many customers have been asking for for quite some time. Definitely recommended.