Crucial P3 Plus 2TB

More capacity. Less cash. But is there a hidden cost?

- JEREMY LAIRD

QLC DRIVES ARE all about giving you more capacity for less cash. But the real question is at what cost? Enter the new P3 Plus, Crucial’s latest value-orientated M.2 SSD, all 2TB of it in this case, for the not all that princely sum of $179. It’s a big old drive for the money.

Apart from the use of cheap QLC rather than faster and more expensive TLC flash memory chips, the P3 Plus exhibits some other pretty obvious corner-cutting. Unlike Crucial’s premium SSDs, which are specced out with the brand’s own controller chips, the P3 Plus makes do with a bought-in Phison E21T controller. It’s basically a budget PCIe Gen 4 chip with four memory channels where premium controllers have eight channels. What’s more, it’s a so-called DRAM-less controller, meaning it doesn’t support dedicated DDR cache memory. In lieu, your PC’s system memory handles the primary storage caching.