CRUCIAL P3 PLUS

A 1TB Gen4 drive for a good price, but it misses out on award thanks to the cheaper WD Black SN770

Although it has a similar name to the Crucial P3, the P3 Plus is a slightly different beast. Here, the drive has been upgraded to a PCI-E Gen4 interface, up from the Gen 3 interface on the standard P3.

Claimed read and write figures have been improved to 5,000MB/sec and 3,000MB/sec respectively. That means the benchmark results are better, although not necessarily by as much as you might expect.

In the AS SSD sequential test, the P3 Plus managed read speeds of 4,267MB/sec and write speeds of 3,344MB/sec, which puts it well above the P3. Things are closer in the Random test, with the P3 Plus scoring 2,003MB/sec read speeds and 2,588MB/sec write speeds: only fractionally ahead of the P3.

Turn to the PCMark 10 benchmarks and it’s a similar story: the P3 Plus scored 3,352 in the Data Disk test and a huge 5,238 in the Data Disk test, which is only just behind the WD Black SN770.

As with the P3 and the SN770, the P3 Plus doesn’t have any SDRAM cache, relying on system memory and an SLC cache. For normal tasks, as the PCMark 10 results show, this is a fast SSD.