Customer Ratings & Reviews

It’s alright “cons” for this one is that you need to buy a separate heatsink… I rather get the Corsair MP600 PRO LX with no needing of a separate heatsink because it’s already attached and the price is little cheaper and the read speeds is @ 6500+ vs this crucial at 5600mbps… do yourself a favor and get the Corsair MP600 pro LX with much better speeds and comes with heatsink and little cheaper too. Look at the picture I included of the speed with the Corsair MP600 pro LX 1TB.. I also got a top heatsink along and looks nicer instead of thee original top heatsink.

Windows 11 specs needed this upgrade. Got it for a 64 bit 'Ryzen CPU' build, Gigabyte MOBO approved part, along with some others. All approved. Rig is very quiet, and snap fast. Traditional SSD or HD comes no where close to these for OS loading, running programs etc. If you are building now, consider following CPU / MOBO recommendations, otherwise it may not work as you expect!

If you are going to get a Crucial NVMe drive, please get this P5 Plus model; you will see multiple reviews listing issues with the less expensive P5 model. I have purchased two of the 1TB P5 Plus models, and I installed one in a desktop and one in a laptop. However, neither the desktop nor the laptop must be PCIe Gen 4 compatible because my read/write speeds were only half of Crucial's claimed "up to 6600MB/s sequential reads" and "up to 5000MB/s sequential writes" (see attached images of CrystalDiskInfo stats for each system). For most users with a one-to-three-year-old computer that has a M.2 2280 slot, your average maximum is going to be 3000MB/s read/write. If you have a brand new, high end system that is confirmed to have a PCIe Gen 4 M.2 2280 slot, then you may very well reach the mythical 6600MB/s numbers that Crucial advertises. Will the average user be able to tell the difference between 3000MB/s and 6600MB/s? Probably not; the P5 Plus is crazy-fast either way. However, if stats matter to you and you are buying this drive in hopes of reaching Crucial's advertised maximums, be sure your system is PCIe Gen 4 ready. Also, if you plan on putting this drive in a desktop, Crucial's included screw is useless; the screw's threads and head are too small to secure the drive to a desktop board. Please make sure your desktop board has the right screw before attempting an install. While Crucial's screw did work in the laptop, the head of the screw is still a bit small; Crucial should include a screw with a larger head for a more secure fit. I am giving this product four out of five stars; Crucial should disclose the realistic read/write speeds for most users and not just the PCIe Gen 4 speeds, and the included screw is trash. Nevertheless, this drive is fast and works amazingly well in Windows 10.

*Summary: The Crucial P5 Plus NVME drive lived up to its marketing claims and delivered a great performance on my Windows 10 PC. Everything was sped up, like video editing, gaming, and transferring large files. The 5-year warranty is awesome and the price is competitive and reasonable. It's a win! _____ *Pros: -Fast performance for all scenarios - gaming, video editing, and file transfers. -Simple and quick install into my laptop. -Good pricing and value for a PCIe 4.0 drive. -Runs 10C cooler than my Samsung NVME drive. -5-year warranty. _____ Cons: -None. The Crucial P5 Plus Gen4 NVME drive is my second drive from Crucial (I'm usually a Samsung guy) and I'm delighted with it. The drive offers everything I want from an NVME drive - easy installation (thanks to the included screw), low temperatures (10C cooler than my Samsung 960 Evo 1TB NVME inside the same laptop), consistently speedy performance in everything I do with it (gaming, video editing, large file transfers), and a reassuring 5-year warranty period. The installation of the P5 Plus was a cakewalk. After undoing about 15 screws & popping off the bottom cover of my Asus TUF 15.6" gaming laptop, I slid the drive in and used the included screw to hold it down. To activate the drive in Windows 10, I just went into Computer Management -> Disk Management, and initialized it. It was available as a 931.00 GB NTFS drive ready to go. I tried Cyberpunk 2077 on it and the game installed very quickly and loading times were short and sweet. Same for Resident Evil Village. NVME drives truly are the best when it comes to gaming and I can't imagine ever going back to SATA-3 mechanical hard drives with their bulk, slowness, and noisiness. Doing video editing with Cyberlink PowerDirector 19 also resulted in tangible improvements in speed and smoothness. With a 11th-gen Tiger Lake Intel Core i7 11370H CPU, 16GB of DDR4-3200, and the 1TB Crucial P5 Plus NVME, my workflow has received a pleasant bump in performance while getting ample storage space. I benchmarked the P5 with CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 and the results were excellent (see pic). If my Asus laptop had supported the newer PCIe 4.0 standard, my scores would've been higher. Thanks to the backward compatibility, I can still enjoy the drive and transfer it to a PCIe 4.0-supporting motherboard later down the road when I build a new PC within the upcoming year. When it comes to thermals, I was very impressed with the relatively low temperatures. Compared to my older Samsung 960 Evo NVME drive inside the same laptop, the P5 Plus ran 10C lower. I do prop up my laptop using a riser stand to improve airflow and prevent thermal throttling. To manage the P5 Plus from Win10, I downloaded the Crucial Storage Executive app and I liked it for its clean interface and ability to perform firmware updates. === Is it a good buy? === Absolutely. You're getting cutting-edge performance from a big brand-name company with a 5-year warranty.

Really like the improvement in speed these give. Took a long time to get rid of my hard drives but the snappiness of these is great

Bought for my son's PS5. After firmware update and relatively easy installation it was recognized immediately. Speeds are perfect for the PS5 6500mbps for this particular drive. Definitely worth the money.

Works great tested by PS5 at 5800 speed when formating got storage now.

Works great. Should install with heat sink for added protection

============================= >>>>> Bottom Line Up front: <<<<< ============================= Crucial has made obtaining a high performing Gen4 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD more affordable and easier than ever. This 1TB M.2 (2280 Form Factor) SSD is arguably one of the best component upgrades you can make for the money – particularly if you’re coming from a traditional OG HDD disk/platter drive. Thanks to the downloadable software Crucial bundles the P5 Plus – “Acronis True Image for Crucial” – backing up and copying your things to your new 1TB P5 Plus SSD is easy and relatively painlessly (more on that below). With a 5 year warranty, backwards compatibility with Gen3/PCIe 3.0 systems, full drive encryption and lots of technical support features through the Crucial Storage Executive App. The P5 Plus even comes with an M.2 screw! (unlike sooooo many others out there). ====================================== >>>>> Packaging/Unboxing/Aesthetics: <<<<< ====================================== It’s always hard to believe something so small, can be so powerful. The Crucial 1TB P5 Plus M.2 2280 SSD drive is neatly secured and packed into a plastic tray that slides into a unassuming paper based outer container. I really appreciated the addition of an extra M.2 screw inside the packaging as well. I have lost so many of those things, and even though my mother board manufacturer included some when I bought it; I have no idea where I placed them now – and some of us aren’t always fortunate enough to have computer hardware store near by to run and grab one if you need it. I wish more manufactures would be kind enough to think of the end users like Crucial does here. As with all the other M.2 2280 SSDs, the Crucial 1TB P5 Plus is a gum stick shaped drive that plug directly into your motherboard, or some cases the mainboard of an external enclosure (if you’re going that route). I really liked the blacked-out aesthetics that the P5 Plus was sporting – black & white labels on a black & gold colored PCB. The P5 Plus should just about fit into literally any color scheme you have in your rig thanks to that. You’ll also find a nice little paper quick start guide that also lists Crucial’s other resources for installation, technical support, additional software downloads (like Acronis and Storage Executive) and even video based walkthroughs if you need them. ================================================ >>>>> Personal Usage Observations/Performance: <<<<< ================================================ In the ever evolving landscape of PC computer components, it can be difficult to stay up to date with the latest and greatest trends and products. Fortunately, Micron has been providing consumers and professionals with affordable high performance storage and RAM solutions for as long as I can remember. I think the 1TB P5 Plus PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD is a big part of that evolution. In order to unlock the performance increase with a Gen4 PCIe 4.0 drive – YOU NEED TO MAKE SURE YOUR CPU AND MOTHERBOARD CHIPSET SUPPORT THE STANDARD. Didn’t want to yell that out back there – but you need to make sure your rocking the appropriate Intel Z490/Z590 chipsets & 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs - OR - AMD X570/B550 chipsets & Ryzen 3000/5000 series CPUs. In my case, I was adding this 1TB Crucial P5 Plus NVMe SSD to replace my older 500GB Samsung 860 EVO SATA SSD that served as my main boot drive. My rig consists of an AMD 3700X CPU & MSI MEG x570 ACE with 32GB of Corsair DDR4-3600. I had been patiently waiting for PCIe 4.0 drives to reach the “normal” pricing realms, so as you can see my older Samsung 860 EVO was the “slowest” / oldest tech in my system. A lot of people seem to say there isn’t much difference between SSDs, or PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 4.0 …. That the performance increases are minor, or only in certain usage case scenarios, etc. Well let me tell that couldn’t be more incorrect based on my observations. I didn’t personally “time” my boot times, or loading screens prior to making the upgrade – but my system is notably faster during boot up and application loading – and incredibly snappier now even when just using the chrome browser. Installation was a simple as plug and play – although I did run into a small problem with getting the Acronis True Image for Crucial cloning software to work initially though. Fortunately, thanks to Crucial’s live web chat support I was able to resolve the issue relatively quickly. In short, I was unable to clone my old 860 EVO SATA SSD to this new 1TB P5 Plus after following the downloadable links provided on Crucial’s packaging and website. I kept getting an error message pertaining to not having a “Crucial SSD” installed on my system in order to use the Acronis Software that Crucial provides. There are several technical solutions that are outside the scope of this review in order to make sure everything was installed correctly, however the Crucial web support agent was more than happy to make sure I took all the right steps just to be certain. In the end, they were able to resolve my issue through providing me “downloadable software patch” – which did the trick. Other than that 30-45 min troubleshooting issue, I didn’t face any other issues with Windows, AMD, or MSI mainboard drivers not recognizing or playing nice with the 1TB P5 Plus drive. After the process completed, I was up and running and enjoying the performance increase from then on out. ========================== >>>>> Closing thoughts: <<<<< ========================== The 1TB Crucial P5 Plus lived up to my expectations of adding significantly improved performance by migrating from a SATA SSD to a Gen4/PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. The Crucial P5 Plus is chock full of tech such as adaptive thermal protection, dynamic write acceleration, just to name a few and is capable of full-drive encryption to boot. This drive is capable of “read speeds” up to 6600MB/s and “write speeds” of up to 5000MB/s, which sounds great, particularly if your into benchmarking or enterprise level data management and control – but what mattered the most to me is that it “felt” like my system was faster and responsive then before. I think the most difficult decision is going to figure out what capacity will best suit your needs, and I think that this 1TB size is arguably the best capacity at the moment (and for the near future) for the average person. 1TB is more then enough space to handle your OS, multiple locally downloaded games, several 4K movies, and fair amount of productivity suites/tools all at once. Crucial backs this drive up with 5 years warranty, and is rated to withstand up to 1,200 TB of “writes” up to full capacity. Seems like it’s pretty hard to go wrong here.

This drive is super fast when used via PCIe 4.0 capable motherboards! Installation is straight forward if you're familiar with installing M.2 drives. Drive just slides in and screws down. Depending on our motherboard capabilities, to fully utilize this P5 drive, you need to have PCIe 4.0 available and it must be operational at full speeds. When meeting this criteria, the read/write speeds should be close to 6000 MB/sec. In my case, I meet this criterial and was able to clock in at 6241.09 MB/s Read and 4834.82 MB/s Write. Which is EXTREMELY fast. Overall my system feels snappier, apps load very quickly, and data copying, installing, moving it all very fast. The 1TB of space is very welcomed as well. The drive maintains low temperatures and had been a dream to use. If you have a capable system or looking to future proof with plans to upgrade to a more capable motherboard in the future, you cannot go wrong with the Crucial P5!

The new Crucial P5 Plus 1TB M.2 Internal Solid State Drive was a welcome addition to my gaming rig. After considering other well-known brands, I decided on this drive for several reasons including its fast speed, up to 6600MB/s, and latest Gen4 NVMe technology. Assuming you know how to initialize a new hard drive for your computer or laptop to recognize you have a new drive installed, it was a simple standard set up. During set up, Crucial provides you a link to download software to clone a pre-existing drive or you can set it up yourself as an additional drive for storage which is what I used it for having run out of the 500GB of storage included with my laptop. My laptop had an extra M.2 SSD slot for this upgrade. If you do not have an extra slot, you will need an external adapter to put the new SSD in and plug into a USB port to clone your existing drive using the included, or similar, software. I ran several benchmarks on the drive after installation and this SSD is much faster than the average SSD others have ran benchmarks on and twice as fast as the included SSD that was installed in my laptop which is less than six months old as you will see in my pictures. Perhaps this high performance is due to Crucial’s design made specifically for high end gaming and massive workloads. It is also backwards compatible with most Gen 3 systems. Some of the advanced features on this generation of M.2 SSD include dynamic write acceleration and adaptive thermal protection to keep your data protected. Overall, this SSD has exceeded my expectations and would recommend it to anyone in the market for a storage upgrade. Just ensure you purchase the correct SSD format as this one is PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe.

After getting this Crucial P5 PCIE 4 and installed I ran a few benchmarks and was BLOWN away! In the box comes with the NVMe and this time they included a screw! Last year's gen 3 didn't. Installation is a breeze and will differ for everyone depending on your personal build. My MSI Prestige has 2 slots and the 1st one was already my 980 pro as my boot drive and installed this as my secondary in the 2nd m.2 slot. The drive when not benchmarking is usually running 38-40 degrees C and about 49 peak when benchmarked. Performance is AMAZING. My 980 Pro hits 6500 but the P5 is always hitting 6700+! Wow! Of course your mileage will vary again on your specs. See my pic for the benchmark. I will definitely be picking up another for extra storage or getting the 2TB version. Highly recommended m.2 drive for those in the market!

As a computer enthusiast, storage is one of the most important components one can choose for their computer; often such decisions are based on price and the performance of the drive. As such, most would certainly agree that Crucial is certainly synonymous in both aspects. As an owner of several of their SSDs, dating back to the M4 as well as various memory kits from the early 2000s, Crucial has proven reliable over many years. With the announcement of the P5 Plus, Crucial attempts to provide you with a cost effective way to enjoy blazing PCIe 4.0 speeds. Thus, I was eager to test the new P5 plus with some real world scenarios, as well as comparing the original P5. As I am sure most are already aware, the M2 drive installation is fairly straightforward. However, I was surprised to find that Crucial included a screw inside the box, as my original P5 and P1 did not come with one. For my tests, I wanted to showcase a variety of scenarios that will provide you with an idea of what to expect. For software, I used Crystalmark 8.0.4 to benchmark the drive. I also used Crystal Disk Info 8.12.6 and HW Monitor 1.44 to monitor temperatures during all of my transfers. I will start with the PCIe 4.0 tests as I am sure that is what most are looking forward to. The P5 was installed on an MSI X570 Pro- A Motherboard coupled with a Ryzen 3900x. In addition, I used my WD My Passport SSD 1TB (Model: WDBAGF0010BBL-WESN) to transfer a bluray image to the P5 then back to the external. Furthermore, I repeated the same process but instead, to test the 4K performance, I transferred a 31.6 GB music folder that holds 5,595 files and 1,193 folders. I will put the full results of all my data in the screenshots. Lastly, keep in mind that your results will differ here. You may or may not exceed my results. Nevertheless, here are the results on PCIe 4.0: Sequential Read Q8T1: 6,830.71 MB/s / Sequential Write Q8T1: 4,962.82 MB/s Sequential Read 4K Q1T1: 67.67 MB/s / Sequential Write 4K Q1T: 163.66 MB/s As you can see, the results are pretty staggering. During the benchmark, the drive temperature held around 70-75C. Next I began my manual transfer tests by sending a 37 GB bluray ISO image to the P5 plus and immediately noted a scorching 828 MB/s! The transfer held consistently with small spikes of 2-3 MB/s. It hit a peak of 830 MB/s. In addition, I watched temperature range from 60-64c during the transfer. Once completed, the drive quickly settled back down to 50c. The transfer took 38 seconds. Next, I sent the bluray image back to the WD drive where I noted 562-563 MB/s. The transfer rate once again fluctuated by 2-3 MB/s. Much like the previous test, this transfer was extremely consistent. The transfer completed in 50 seconds. Switching transfers, I sent my music folder to the P5, with a smoking range of 610-620 MB/s! As before, the speed adjusted back and forth between 560-570 MB/s. I noted a peak of 661 MB/s, but the bulk of the transfer was mostly in the 580-620 MB/s range. The transfer finished in about 1 minute with a peak temperature reading of 64c. Lastly, that same transfer was sent back to the WD SSD with a much more varied range of 330-470 MB/s. However, eventually it settled in the 370-390 MB/s range for most of the transfer with a peak of 450 MB/s. The transfer took roughly 1 minute and 30 seconds. The P5 plus touched 68c during this last transfer. Overall, the P5 plus was smoking fast and did not disappoint. In addition to the blazing PCIe 4.0 performance, I next wanted to shift to a mobile environment by using a current generation laptop. Initially, I was going to test the P5 Plus PCIe 4.0 performance by using my Asus Q538 flipbook that houses an Intel 11th Generation i7-1165 G7. However, that quickly failed through as two things were discovered. First, the 11th generation CPU enables an enterprise feature called VMD, which allows the CPU to lock the NVMe to its controller. Essentially, this ties back to a feature found on Xeon chips called VROC. Second, Asus had locked my laptop to this exclusive RAID mode which prevented me from switching to the standard AHCI mode. Furthermore, the M2 slot was capped at PCIe 3.0, despite the CPU supporting PCIe 4.0. Thus, it is important to note this as each manufacturer will implement something different. I have seen other 11th generation laptops that allow you to switch back AHCI, but I was not able to test those to see if their M2 slot was locked to the 3.0 lanes like mine was. In any event, even if I could switch back to AHCI, this does not guarantee that I would be able access PCIe 4.0. So to conclude, I want to caution you that PCIe 4.0 on laptops is still in its infancy and may not be fully implemented yet. Aside from this, my Asus laptop did feature two Thunderbolt 40 Gbps ports so I decided to repeat the same transfers I did above to see how the P5 Plus handled being capped on 3.0. Here are my Crystalmark 8.0.4 results: Sequential Read Q8T1: 3,391.01 MB/s / Sequential Write Q8T1: 3,326.09 MB/s Sequential Read 4K Q1T1: 42.55 MB/s / Sequential Write 4K Q1T: 104.55 MB/s As with my manual transfers from before, I started with the bluray image. The transfer began immediately, sustaining an impressive 849-850 MB/s! It was able to peak to 857 MB/s before it worked its way back down to 850 MB/s. As from before, I noted small 2-3 MB/s variations on the transfer rate. Once again, I was blown away. The transfer finished 37.3 GB in 35 seconds! While the 4.0 test was just a smidge slower, a repeated test could have exhibited faster results as they were well within the margin of error. Nonetheless, I was still impressed. Moving on, the same test back to my WD SSD held just as consistently, though a bit slower at 669-674 MB/s. As expected, the transfer took slightly longer, but still completed the task around 45-50 seconds. Next, I sent my music folder to the P5 plus. The transfer took a bit to build up in speed but soon it was able to reach 600 MB/s. I noted a peak of 631 MB/s. However, as the transfer prolonged, it fluctuated a bit in the 580-620 MB/s range. The transfer finished in about one minute. Lastly, I sent the music folder back to my WD external. This was the slowest out of all my tests, but eventually the transfer worked its way up to around 400 MB/s. However, I noted a larger transfer range of 299-510 MB/s, with averages around 340 MB/s. Naturally, the transfer took a bit longer to finish due to its more varied nature, but still the task was completed in a respectable 1 minute 45 seconds. As expected, the overall performance of the P5 plus is sure to impress. Even on PCIe 3.0, the results are quite exhilarating. For my last test, I wanted to compare both the P5 Plus and original P5 using the same laptop and I also wanted to mentioned some interesting temperature data. For this test, I will be using my HP X360 Envy laptop that I used with my original P5. This laptop houses a Ryzen 2500U CPU. First and foremost, here are my benchmark results for both drives. I also included my P2 results for comparison: P5 PLUS: Sequential Read Q8T1: 3,245.79 MB/s / Sequential Write Q8T1: 3,106.11 MB/s P5 PLUS: Sequential Read 4K Q1T1: 55.67 MB/s / Sequential Write 4K Q1T: 116.00 MB/s P5 REG: Sequential Read Q8T1: 3,104.70 MB/s / Sequential Write Q8T1: 3,033.43 MB/s P5 REG: Sequential Read 4K Q1T1: 55.10 MB/s / Sequential Write 4K Q1T: 126.56 MB/s P2: Sequential Read Q8T1: 2,033.12 MB/s / Sequential Write Q8T1: 1,678.48 MB/s P2: Sequential Read 4K Q1T1: 56.55 MB/s / Sequential Write 4K Q1T: 125.85 MB/s As expected, both P5's are fairly equal to each other, though the P5 plus was able to squeeze just a little bit more performance. Furthermore, I expected the thermals to also reflect similar results, but I was in for quite shocked. Starting with the original P5, upon windows boot, the drive registered between 48-52c. It dropped slightly down to 44c after letting it sit there for ten minutes. I ran Crystalmark and the drive rocketed to 63-69C range. Once finished, the drive settled down to 47c. Connectively, the P5 plus completely shocked me. Once the laptop booted windows, the P5 Plus registered 37-40c instead of the typical 48-52c as I had noted on the original P5. After ten minutes, the P5 plus was able to cool itself to an astonishing 30c! Thus, the P5 plus was idling 15-20c cooler than the previous P5! I ran Crystalmark on the new P5 plus and was able to reach 60c-66c. After the benchmark finished, the P5 plus temperature dropped drastically down to 42c and then eventually back down to 30c. In addition, I could physically feel the heat difference between both drives by placing my hand on the bottom of the laptop. It was a revelation to say the least, especially given their equivalent performance. In conclusion, the P5 Plus is a comprehensive NVMe solution that will certainly entice those who are looking for a new SSD. With PCIe 4.0 support, the P5 plus drive will provide you with blazing fast transfers at a reasonable price. I was able to exceed the rated read speed by a pretty decent margin. In addition, the drive was able to handle both sequential and 4K transfers with little effort, even when limited to PCIe 3.0. Even if you are still stuck on PCIe 3.0, the P5 plus proves it could be an affordable future proofing solution. Once you upgrade to PCIe 4.0, you will already have a drive ready to go. Lastly, I was completely blown away at the temperature differences between my original P5 and the new P5 plus. Overall, the Crucial P5 Plus is an exciting upgrade solution for any laptop or desktop. Thus, the new Crucial P5 Plus comes highly recommended.

Fast, small, and cool. Will fit in your laptops m.2 slot or your desktops motherboard. It has single sided memory so it is very thin. Fits under my motherboards heat shield. My motherboard has a hold down screw already but this one does come with a screw. That is what you hear rattling in the package. I had the previous P5 in 1tb. The P5 plus reviewed here is Pci-e 4.0 and synthetic benchmarks show it is blazing fast. Temps stay in the 40c range. In real world use between nvme drives I do not see any much more improvement. Slightly faster transfer speeds. When editing 4k vids and pics windows 10 seems to be the bottleneck. I am using this as my OS drive with my steam/origin game library attached.

We all know we want better, faster, more effective performance with our computer system. In comes the new generation of Gen4 NVMe SSD storage. The 1TB size is great to upgrade to if coming from anything smaller. I can fit in a few games and still get some photos stored as backup to my other drives. As far as performance goes, coming from a 3rd gen, the everyday use seems about the same. Booting my laptop seems a tad faster but I was already quick on bootup. A quick real world test via Crystal Disk Mark shows 5835 Read MB/s and 3666 Write MB/s. Your performance will obviously vary on your system.

I love this little M.2 ssd. I I stalled it in my Alienware M15 gaming laptop for extra storage. The drive loads my games super fast. The drive itself was a breeze to install in the spare M.2 slot. The price is on the steeper side for a 1tb m.2 in my opinion. But, you get what you pay for, and Crucial is a very reputable company. I would like to grab another one of these in 1tb or 2tb for my PS5 when they enable the m.2 slot in a firmware update.

Pros Hardware based encryption Fast Thermal protection built in 5-year warranty Backward compatible with PCIe 3 Keeps temps reasonable Includes Storage Executive to check SSD health Cons Middle of the pack performance Inconsistent performance Acronis doesn’t recognize drive as official Crucial Crucial products usually don’t stand out as the top performer but instead as the most reliable and compatible. The P5 Plus seems to follow this same design mold. Design and Features Packaging is kept minimal with just the SSD and an extra screw if you happened to lose yours. The look is minimalistic with the drive nearly blacked out except the name. No heatsink is included, so for consistent performance you would want to plan for a heatsink or heat spreader. Otherwise, the built-in thermal management will throttling the drive if temps climb too high. The drive works with the regular Windows drivers, but Crucial also offers their own drivers which are mainly for troubleshooting performance and enabling certain features of Storage Executive. Storage Executive is their own software, available for download on their website, which allows checking on SSD health, drive testing, and firmware updates as well as some other features. If your system either has a battery or battery backup, you can also use their Momentum Cache to further enhance performance. It doesn’t prevent you from using it without a battery but just warns of possible data loss. If you are more security conscious, the P5 Plus includes integrated hardware-based encryption so you can fully encrypt your drive without any performance hit. For migration to the new drive, you can download Acronis for free from the website although as of writing this it doesn't recognize the drive as an official Crucial drive and prompts to purchase. Performance For background, the drive is installed on a Ryzen 9 3950X system in a PCIe 4 slot with integrated heat spreader. Under ideal conditions the drive is rated up to 6.6G/s read, and 5GB/s write. In a real-world file copy of 47GB of files, it averaged a respectable 1.5GB/s with files of all sizes. CrystalDiskMark measured close to the rating coming in just shy of 6GB/s read and nearly 5GB/s write. Strangely, the read and write speeds seemed to vary more than other drives, but not enough to notice in daily use. With each benchmark test, the same variability was seen where results were just slightly less consistent than the average drive. When testing game launch times, the same variability could be measured, but was too small to notice. For example, on the original SSD, launch time of a Doom varied by 1.24 seconds. When the library was moved to the P5 Plus, launched times varied 2.78 seconds. Considering that in both cases Doom took nearly 40 seconds to launch, a 2 second difference is hard to spot. It’s hard to say if this might be noticeable elsewhere. Trying this out with other games yielded similar results. While speed has some variability, thermals seem to be more consistent. With repeated use, the drive never went above 67 degrees Celsius, and throttling is listed to activate at 80. This is nice for thermals, and possibly longevity, but doesn’t answer the question of consistency. In daily use, the difference was imperceivable so it’s up to you how much this matters. Final Thoughts While the P5 Plus might be a bit finicky on consistency, it was always up to the task. If you are looking for a PCIe 4 SSD and saving money and having a stable rig are more important that absolute maximum performance, the P5 Plus is worth considering.

The P5 Plus performs better than expected. Attached to a Gen4 M.2 slot, tested speeds frequently exceed what it's rated for, and it's fairly consistent across a number of tests. However, the real-world benefits over Gen3 are fairly small at this point, and loading times in my games were reduced perhaps a second or two. Once DirectStorage starts being utilized by developers, that will probably change. In the meanwhile, I decided to try putting it in my Playstation 5, and it was immediately "detected" at a speed that fell slightly short of Sony's requirements. Regardless, it allowed me to use it and has been performing just as well as the main drive as far as I can tell, and I'll probably leave it there. I'm fairly certain this is the first M.2 drive I've had that came with a mounting screw, which is a nice touch. I'm not sure it's worth upgrading an existing Gen3 drive in a PC just yet, but all things considered, I'd recommend this to anyone building a new system, or someone looking to add storage to their Playstation 5.

Fast, cheap, competitive TBW rating, easy to install, trustworthy brand, and includes a heatsink. What's not to like?

Works great, super easy install. Fast additional storage and cheap