The next SSD which has arrived in our labs is the P3 Plus 2TB from Crucial, which shares quite a bit of hardware components from the P3. We are getting again a DRAMless solution with a Phison controller, paired with QLC NAND ICs to obtain a cost-affordable price per gigabyte, but the endurance is lower versus the TLC drives.

P3 Plus has arrived inside a very compact cardboard enclosure with the usual Crucial box art, showing a photo of the drive on the frontal area, together with the total storage space and the bus it was meant to function on:

On the back side, we will note the fact that the SSD is backed up with a data transfer software (Acronis), a written instruction guide, but the product also allows firmware updates. The product is also backed up by a limited 5-year warranty given that we do not break the mentioned TBW rating:

Inside we will note a small leaflet but also a transparent plastic enclosure:

The leaflet guides the user towards the online resources:

There is also a screw shipped with the drive, in order to help with fixing the drive onto the desired slot:

The P3 Plus SSD comes with the frontal area of the PCB completely covered by a sticker, carrying the Crucial logo, but also the product logo:

On the back side we will note a lack of extra components, but only two stickers which include the product code name, its serial number, but also its power rating:

After removing the frontal sticker, we did note four NAND ICs, a central controller, and no DRAM cache:

Each of the four Micron chips are marked 2FC2D NY161 which tells us that we are dealing with 3D QLC NAND:

In terms of the controller, we’ve got the Phison PS5021-E21-48, which incorporates an ARM 32-bit Cortex-R5 architecture with a single CPU. For caching purposes, it does use HMB (Host Memory Buffer) and this time it is enabled for PCIe 4.0 data transfers. The controller does support up to 4 channels and a flash transfer rate up to 1600MT/s: