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Crucial P3 Plus 4TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 SSD Review

Storage/SSD by stefan @ 2023-07-23

The P3 Plus 4TB drive from Crucial is a good product to consider when aiming mostly at high-capacity and less on the speed, performing well as a mainstream drive. We noted that it does not get as hot as its 2TB counterpart but does still require placement in a well-ventilated chassis and covered by a heatsink provided by the computer motherboard. Using such drive in a laptop will surely max out the temperatures and besides a shorter lifespan, the drive will also perform less than desired, due to throttling.

Product Features, Specifications

Product Features:

Powerful Performance

Upgrade your PC with the fast Gen4 performance it needs at a price you want. The Crucial P3 Plus NVMe SSD delivers load times and data transfers that are 8.9x faster than SATA and 43% faster than the fastest Gen3 SSDs.

Spacious Storage

With generous space of up to 4TB, the Crucial P3 Plus offers powerful Gen4 storage for loads of apps, programs, files, docs, photos, videos, and games — with room to spare.

Trusted Technology

Crucial P3 Plus Gen4 NVMe SSDs are built with high-quality Micron® Advanced 3D NAND, tested and validated to the exacting standards you’ve come to expect from one of the world’s largest manufacturers of flash memory. Want proof? Go check out our award-winning line of SSDs.

Solid Security

Gen4 technology, SSD management software for performance optimization, and firmware updates give the Crucial P3 Plus Gen4 NVMe SSD everything you need for security and peace of mind.

Product Specifications:

General tech specs

SSD series: P3 Plus

Interface: NVMe (PCIe Gen 4 x4)

Capacity: 4TB

Form factor: M.2 (2280)

SSD Endurance (TBW): 800TB

Speed

Sequential Read: 4,800 MB/s

Sequential Write: 4,100 MB/s

Warranty & returns

Warranty: Limited 5-year

Comment from jmke @ 2023/07/26

hey Stefan,

during Amazon sales I bought a Crucial P3 (none plus) 4TB NVMe drive
installed in a machine with PCI NVMe slot, have a few other SSD SATA and NVMe Samsung drives also around.

What you experienced here:

is exactly what I saw too; also take a look at the drive activity in task manager when you see this sharp drop in performance.

like you had here

Thi is because Crucial is using: Micron 176 Layer 3D QLC NAND – Quadruple-Level-Cell ;
in order of performance , SSD Cells
SLC > MLC > QLC/QLC

the P3 and P3 Plus have NO dedicated DRAM cache, they will first write data first level SLC, once that is filled , will start going in the QLC and this is where you see the huge performance drop AND a huge increase in response times (3000ms+) and the disk I/O is at 100%. And this during a simple sequential write action.

My 10 year old SATA150 HDD has higher sequential write speeds than this NVMe SSD!

and once that I/O is at 100%, FULL system hang.
This drive should never be used as an OS Disk; and even as a scratch/data disk, seeing the performance drop; cannot really recommend it.

the 2TB Crucial P3 Plus is at €99 at Amazon.de
Samsung 970 Evo 2TB NVMe is at €98 at same shop

and that is a complete no brainer; the Samsung EVO 970 hold consistent NVMe PCI express levels of performance, not seeing ANY drops in performance as stellar as this Crucial one and I/O activity remains lower and latency is at <1ms, instead of 2000-3000ms I see with the Crucial NVMe

this is one drive to avoid imho

Comment from jmke @ 2023/07/26

here is somebody with the exact same experience with Crucial P3 Plus

https://www.digitec.ch/en/page/why-i...this-ssd-25853

Quote:

A quarter of the storage volume – that’s 250 GB in the case of my test sample – can be written with 1 bit in the fast, single-level cell mode (SLC). Once these are used up, the disk switches back to QLC mode. SSDs use a trick here. Namely, if SLC mode is exhausted and no large write operations are pending, they shovel the data into the QLC memory. This should free up a quarter of the available memory for SLC mode. As my test shows, this only works to a limited extent on the Crucial P3 Plus.

Here, too, the P3 Plus falls short. When the SSD is empty, the transfer speed is 1.5 GB/s on average, and it doesn’t throttle at any point. This is a decent value.

However, my further tests reveal a big problem with the P3 Plus. I delete all data from the SSD and repeat the test with twice the amount of data, i.e. 138 GB, by creating copies of the movies on the system drive. I repeat the latter step until the P3 Plus starts throttling. Shortly after the start of the third round – with around 250 GB of total data written so far – the SSD throttles to an average of 70 MB/s.

Comment from jmke @ 2023/07/26

my experience in one picture:

80Mb/s max write speeds;
Latency spikes, activity at 100%

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