Crucial Launches Its Fastest Ever M.2 SSD

We’re fast approaching the end of the road for PCIe 3.0 as PCIe 4.0 adoption begins by storage and motherboard manufacturers, but Crucial is offering us one more, “extra fast” 3.0 drive called the P5.

The Crucial P5 SSD is a PCIe x4 NVMe M.2 drive using Micron’s TLC 3D NAND chips and controller to offer sequential read speeds of up to 3,400MB/s and sequential write speeds of 3,000MB/s. Four storage capacities are being offer, with the 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB options all boasting the speeds mentioned. It’s only the 250GB model that takes a hit, with the sequential write speed reduced to 1,400MB/s.

According to Teresa Kelley, vice president of Micron Consumer Products Group, “The Crucial P5 is our fastest and most innovative SSD product to date, pushing the capabilities of NVMe Gen 3 to meet the demands of a rapidly growing market … PC and gaming enthusiasts will find that the P5 was built to answer their call for high performance and processing power.”

As well as promising to be an extremely fast internal SSD, Crucial offers each drive with a five year warranty and bundles Crucial Storage Executive for easy drive management, and Acronis True Image for easily replacing your existing drive, in the box. The life expectancy of the P5 is 1.8 million hours, but the endurance differs based on the model chosen. The 250GB model offers 150 Total Bytes Written (TBW), the 500GB model offers 300TBW, the 1TB 600TBW, and the 2TB manages 1,200TBW.

For now, the P5 is listed as coming soon and no pricing has been revealed. Crucial did, however announce a new budget-friendly P2 M.2 SSD at the same time as the P5. It’s already available in 250GB and 500GB capacities for $54.99 and $64.99 respectively. The read and write speeds are significantly lower than those offered by the P5, but still respectable enough to consider either P2 for an older laptop or PC storage upgrade.

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