Crucial P2 250GB and 500GB SSD Review

Crucial P2 M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs Tested

The Crucial P2 M.2 NVMe SSD series recently came to market and is now the entry-level NVMe SSD for drive maker here in 2020. You’ll only find the Crucial P2 SSD available in 250GB and 500GB capacity drives. A 1TB capacity P2 drive is planned, but is not yet available. So, if you are looking for more storage space than 500GB this very second, this drive series is not the drive for you. This drive is all about having a super low price and allowing Crucial to win the value market when it comes to SSD upgrades.

So, what is the price? The Crucial P2 250GB is $49.99 ($0.20 per GB) and the Crucial P2 500GB is $64.99 ($0.13 per GB) and those prices include shipping and each drive comes backed by a 5-year warranty.

When it comes to performance the Crucial P2 series is well, an entry-level NVMe Drive. Crucial is only really touting sequential read/write speeds in their specifications and for that you get 2300 MB/s read and 940 MB/s on the 500GB model and 2100 MB/s read and 1140 MB/s write on the 250GB drive. For the Crucial P2 series they opted to use a DRAM-less and are using the Phison E13 controller with Micron 64-layer TLC NAND Flash memory. While the Crucial P2 SSD currently relies on Micron TLC 3D NAND technology and over time Crucial stated that it may use Microns QLC NAND Flash on this series and rated it as such already. We believe the transition to QLC NAND Flash will happen rather quickly on the 500GB P2 NVMe SSD and that is why the sequential write speed is rated lower.

Crucial sent out both the P2 250GB and P2 500GB drives for Legit Reviews to take a look at. Both of these models are single-sided M.2 2280 form factor drivers that work on the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. The 250GB drive has a 150 TBW endurance rating and the 500GB drive has a longer 300 TBW endurance rating. TBW stands for Total Bytes Written and is the amount of data that can be written to the drive under its 5-year warranty without breaking the limited warranty.

There are no components located on the back of these NVMe SSDs.

When peeling back a Crucial P2 product label you can see the Phison PS5013-E13T controller. The Phison datasheet for this DRAM-less controller shows that it is capable of up to 2,500 MB/s sequential read and 2,100 MB/s sequential write. With regards to Random 4K performance, it is rated at 295,000 IOPS read and 430,000 IOPS write.

Crucial went with Micron 64-layer TLC NAND Flash on both of our modules. Thee FBGA code on the package reads NX959 and this comes back to part number MT29F1T08EMHAFJ4-3R:B. There are two of these packages on the 250GB drive and four of them on the 500GB drive.

Crucial Storage Executive software is free and available to download for those that would like to have an SSD toolkit at their disposal.

Here is promotional video for the Crucial P2 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD series before we look at the test system and get to the benchmarks!