Crucial has been barrelling into thebudget SSDmarket lately, pumping out drives, like theCrucial BX500, that are designed to pull in buyers on the basis of price. That's been wholly on the Serial ATA front, though, and the Crucial P1 ($69.99 for the 500GB version we tested) is the company's first PCI Express NVMe SSD, making Crucial a relative latecomer to this market. The P1 achieves budget-SSD status by using 3D QLC NAND flash memory. (Among the first drives to adopt this new type of memory module is the SATA-interfaceSamsung SSD 860 QVO.) But in doing so, the P1 is a clear step behind the pace of most PCI Express M.2 drives, especially in the capacity tested here. That's not a deal-killer for all shoppers, but know that the P1, despite "PCI Express" and "NVMe" in the spec list, is a price play more than a speed one.
Plenty of Features, Light on Price
If you've seen oneM.2 NVMe SSD, chances are you've seen them all—unless a given model happens to be topped by a fancy heat spreader of some kind. Because there's so much visual similarity in this category of drives, I can't fault the Crucial P1 for not winning any style awards with its plain-PCB design.
But the lack of a heat spreader is a missed opportunity. Unlike some of the mainstream drives tested by PC Labs of late, the P1 doesn't come with one to mount on top of the drive during installation in a desktop motherboard. (For a laptop drive install, a heat spreader with any vertical dimension usually will end up getting left off.) Some motherboards, of course, have flip-up heat spreaders over the M.2 slot or slots, but that's just as likely as not. Either way, you'll need to make sure you have a motherboard that's compatible with Type-2280 M.2 drives (shorthand for the dimensions of the drive: 22mm wide and 80mm long).
Our test drive, as mentioned, is the 500GB version of the P1, ringing up at a $69.99 MSRP, which works out to 14 cents per gigabyte. Given that calculation, the Crucial P1 is highly competitive with the budget category ofPCI Express NVMe drivesbased on 3D TLC NAND (and now, QLC NAND) production processes. (For more on TLC, NAND, and other esoteric SSD lingo,see our SSD dejargonizer.)
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One aspect of the P1's backing by Crucial is a pleasant surprise. Not so much its rated endurance; the 500GB drive's 100 terabytes written (TBW) rating is a little under the norm for drives of this size, but that is in line with its price point. The thing is, if anythingdoesgo wrong, Crucial backs the drive with a five-year limited warranty, which covers you either for that full duration or until you go over the 100TBW line. That's a decent warranty length, given that some budget SSDs are covered for only three years.
Crucial also sells the P1 in a 1TB variant, which carries a rating of 200TBW and retails for $129.99. That works out to a price per gigabyte of 13 cents.
Crucial advertises a host of additional features available with the P1 that are bit difficult to quantify the value of. These include overheat protection (thanks, ostensibly, to some adaptive thermal-monitoring tools), and (supposedly) faster writes aided by SLC caching. In the latter case, a subset of the drive's memory modules is used as if it was faster SLC memory, which stores just one bit per cell. This is a common acceleration technique used by budget-minded drives.
No doubt here, though, that the software package is a worthy contender. The P1 relies on Crucial's ubiquitousStorage Executive software(Opens in a new window)to help users manage their drive. As we've pointed out in previous reviews of Crucial SSDs, such as the Crucial BX500, the suite is one of the most comprehensively kitted-out that you'll find in the consumer-grade SSD market. Enterprise users and general consumers alike will find a lot of utility here, from the Sanitize Drive feature to a firmware updater and more.
Right on Read, Weak on Write
Because the Crucial P1 is a member of the budget SSD community, we weren't expecting it to shatter any records, and Crucial's rated speeds for this drive set expectations accordingly. But we would have liked it to see it perform slightly better than it did across most of our benchmarks relative to other recent PCI Express offerings. That said, it's still plenty fast relative to a SATA SSD. All of the SSDs charted below are PCI Express NVMe M.2 drives, with theSamsung SSD 970 EVO Plusan exemplar of mainstream PCI Express performance. The WD Blue SN500 is in the process of being reviewed, and is a budget-minded PCI Express 3.0 x2, as opposed to x4, drive, employing fewer PCI Express lanes. (The Mushkin Pilot is another PCI Express budget drive recently tested but not yet reviewed, included given that it is another 500GB drive.)
First up is PCMark 8's Storage test, which simulates everyday disk accesses in tasks such as editing photos and web browsing. You'll notice almost no differences here...
Here, the Crucial P1 held its own with most of the other drives we've tested. That said, it's rare to see much variance in the PCMark 8 Storage test across PCI Express M.2 drives, no matter which drive is under the microscope. PCI Express drives as a whole tend to perform at one level, SATA SSDs at another, and so on.
The Crystal DiskMark test, specifically the Sequential Q32T1 trial, is where things took a turn...
水晶顺序测试模拟最好,straight-line transfers of large files, and in this scenario the drive ran well behind the leading PCI Express drives tested of late, with results of just 1,932MBps read and 907MBps write. Although these speeds easily top typical Serial ATA drive speeds, and the read results were not the lowest PC Labs has seen among PCI Express drives, the write scoreswerethe lowest of our PCIe comparison lot. That said, they aren't a shock; they are not far out of line with Crucial's rated maximums for the drive at the 500GB capacity, at 1,900MBps for sequential reads and 950MBps for writes. (The projected write-speed ceiling ismuchhigher for the 1TB version of this drive.)
By comparison, the 4K (or "random" read/write) tests simulate typical small-file-access processes involved in program/game loads or bootup sequences...
...and here the Crucial P1 rebounded slightly, getting itself back in line with the rest of the drives priced in the same tier. It was still among the slower PCI Express-based drives we've tested in the past few months, but not so slow that users would feel the performance pinch under most circumstances.
The AS-SSD transfer-test results were more of the same middling, but satisfactory for most cases, results...
在该测试中,驱动器复制两个大文件夹(typical game and program folders) and a large file (a big ISO) from one location on the drive to another to see how the drive handles sustained work. Here, the P1 is simply outrun by similarly priced entries such as the Mushkin Pilot on the ISO file transfer, but it hangs tough in the program-file and game-folder transfers.
A Fine Enough Value, But It's a Tough Market
Budget SSDs are a fine balance of cost per gigabyte, warranty length, endurance rating, and software support, and pricing changes day to day can invert the dynamic. Crucial's first NVMe effort is competent enough, but drive makers like ADATA, Mushkin, and WD are plying the same waters.
Mushkin试点,例如,文章的结果are roughly a third quicker on sequential read speeds and nearly twice as fast on write, despite costing only fractions of a cent more per gigabyte. Though Crucial carries some heft with this drive on the software side of things, its benchmark results are topped here by drives that don't cost all that much more and that offer higher TBW ratings with the same warranty. A little more pricing daylight between them might make the difference in favor of the P1. We also think, if you need the extra gigabytes, that the 1TB version of the P1 is likely a bit more compelling. The cost per gig is a little lower, and, though we haven't tested it, the rated speeds are a lot higher.
But even as is, the P1 will serve users with light read and write demands well enough, if they're in an upgrade or PC-build situation that demands a PCI Express M.2 drive at the lowest possible cost per gig.
Crucial's P1 is a cost-oriented QLC-memory-based M.2 SSD, the company's first PCI Express NVMe effort. The result is a pinch on performance—faster than SATA, slower than most PCIe drives—but one that may be a fair trade-off for budget-minded upgraders and PC builders.
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