CRUCIAL P3

At current prices the WD Blue SN5/0 makes a better choice, but find the P3 for less and that could change

One of the cheapest SSDs you can buy, the Crucial P3 costs just 9p per gigabyte for the 1TB version we reviewed. Thanks to its QLC storage, it’s also available in 500GB, 2TB and 4TB formats. As a cheaper M.2 SSD, this drive uses the slightly older PCI-E Gen3 interface.

As with other budget drives, there’s no SDRAM cache on this model, with the drive instead using SLC caching and a Host Memory Buffer (HMB), where system memory acts as the buffer. As we’ve seen with other drives to use similar techniques, this no longer dramatically impacts performance.

In fact, the Crucial P3 did rather well in all of our benchmarks. In the PCMark 10 System Disk test, the Crucial drive scored 3,210, and it also scored 4,825 in the Data Disk test. Both benchmarks are based on regular real-world usage, so high scores here suggest that the drive will be efficient in regular use.

When it comes to more demanding use, such as games or large file copies, the AS SSD benchmarks show what a drive is made of. Here, the P3 drops further down the table, with sequential read speeds of 3,217MB/sec and read speeds of 2,933MB/sec.