Crucial P2 500GB

What’s this? Low-cost SATA-breaking speed without the DRAM?   Sean Webster is impressed, albeit with a few reservations.

- Sean Webster

On the hunt for a new SSD for your system? Then you’ve probably noticed there are innumerable options. If you’ve got the dough, you may want to consider one of the newest PCIe 4.0 x4 options, say the Seagate FireCuda 520 or Sabrent’s Rocket NVMe 4.0.

Crucial’s P2 is the company’s latest M.2 NVMe SSD for the low-budget crowd. The 250GB and 500GB capacities are well-suited for basic boot and application requirements; a 1TB option is on the way.

The P2 features Dynamic Write Acceleration, which programs a pool of TLC flash as faster SLC, for faster write performance, after its fills and write performance degrades. The drives come with RAID ECC and Phison’s fourth-generation LDPC that has multiple levels of adaptation. As a result, Crucial’s P2’s endurance ratings, though they are low for TLC SSDs, aren’t as offensive as some of the QLC SSDs we’ve looked at. The company rates the 250GB P2 up to 150TB of writes within its five-year warranty and adds another 150TB of write endurance with each doubling of capacity.