Crucial P5 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The Crucial P5 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD series is the first high performance NVMe drive for the consumer market for Micron. The performance of the drive seems to be solid and a premium NVMe drive from Crucial is certainly a welcomed addition to the market. That said, the Crucial P5 seems to be a little late to market as a handful of native PCIe 4.0 controllers should be coming out in the second half of 2020. This PCIe 3.0 based drive would have been great to see released in 2019 where it would have been highly competitive with the Phison and SMI controlled drives that have been popular in the higher-end market in recent years.

When it comes to performance the Crucial P5 ended up in the middle of most of our performance charts. The Crucial P5 1TB drive is rated at 3,500MB/s read and 3,000 MB/s write for sequential performance. Using a benchmark like CrystalDiskMark we were able to reach over 3,500 MB/s read and just shy of 3,000 MB/s write speeds on the Crucial P5 1TB drive.

Benchmarks like PCMark 10 that use real-world traces to test performance showed the P5 1TB drive having average performance and the drive ended up in the middle of the performance charts. The biggest shock was that the Crucial P5 performed worse than some of the DRAM-less solutions on the market that cost substantially less. We asked Crucial about this and they informed Legit Reviews that Crucial is taking a harder look at PC Mark 10, as they think that there might be some anomalies in the way that it’s handling their architecture. This is something that Crucial was looking at internally before and it sounds like they are looking for the root cause in the hopes that something can be corrected. Crucial just recently made the switch from using PCMark 8 to PCMark 10 internally, so they are still figuring it all out.

That said, more than one SSD manufacturer has expressed concerns with the PCMark 10 results and have been concerned with how much weight to put onto the results.

Crucial P5 NVMe SSD

When it comes to pricing the Crucial P5 MSRP has the 250GB being $62.99 ($0.25 per GB), the 500GB model being 500GB is $86.99 ($0.17 per GB), the 1TB at $179.99 ($0.18 per GB) and the 2TB model being $399.99 ($0.20 per GB). We believe that street pricing will be lower on these drives to ensure they are competitive with other solutions on the market. The HP SSD EX950 1TB SSD runs $134.99 and the ADATA SX8200 Pro 1TB is $139.99. Both of those drives have been out for over 1.5 years and deliver comparable performance.

The Crucial P5 drives are backed by a 5-year warranty should any issues pop up. Crucial even offers a 45-day money-back period if you buy the drive direct from them and have any issues.

The Crucial P2 series is available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. Suggested retail pricing will be $62.99 for the smallest 250GB drive, $86.99 for a 500GB model, $179.99 for the 1TB and $399.99 for the largest 2TB capacity SSD. So, you are looking at anywhere from $0.17 to $0.25 per GB for the Crucial P5 series.

At the end of the day the Crucial P5 1TB SSD is a solid-performing drive, but it fails to be the ‘extraordinary’ drive that Crucial markets it as being. Maybe the engineering team can work some magic with firmware tweaks down the road, but for now its just another mainstream NVMe drive.

Legit Bottom Line: The Crucial P5 M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs is a super fast PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe drive, but comes to market late when enthusiasts are transitioning over to PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSDs!

Crucial P5 SSD Part Numbers

  • 250GB – CT250P5SSD8
  • 500GB – CT500P5SSD8
  • 1TB – CT1000P5SSD8
  • 2TB – CT2000P5SSD8