The test system used in this review is equipped with an Intel Core i7-6700K CPU, GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-UD3 motherboard, 32GB (16GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix Sport LT DDR4 memory, Samsung 960 PRO 512GB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 Enterprise.
To test the performance of Crucial's P1 SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark 8. For comparison, I've also included test results from the ADATA XPG SX8200, Western Digital WD Black NVMe, Samsung 970 EVO, Samsung 970 PRO, Plextor M9Pe, Plextor M8Se, Patriot Hellfire, ADATA XPG SX8000, Samsung 960 PRO, Toshiba OCZ RD400, Samsung 950 PRO, Samsung 860 QVO, Samsung 860 PRO, Crucial MX500, Plextor M8V, Samsung T5, Crucial BX300, ADATA Ultimate SU900, Plextor S3C, Toshiba OCZ VX500, ADATA Ultimate SU800, Plextor S2C and Crucial MX300.
As I mentioned earlier, the P1 is based on Silicon Motion's SM2263EN controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark tool measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its random read and write speeds using blocks 512K and 4K in size.
 Crucial P1 500GB |
 ADATA XPG SX8200 240GB |
According to Crucial, the 500GB version of the P1 is capable of reading at 1,950 MB/s and writing at 950 MB/s. While the drive performed well, it came up a bit short of these numbers in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write speed tests.
 Crucial P1 500GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
 ADATA XPG SX8200 240GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
The P1 performed equally well when using highly compressible 0x00 (0 Fill) data. This time around, the drive was able to read at 1,926 MB/s and write at 934.6 MB/s.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the Crucial P1's read, write and burst speeds as well as its seek times and CPU usage.
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the P1 had average read and write speeds of 1536.6 MB/s and 179.6 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 1312.1 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that it uses some sort of SLC caching. The drive starts writing at about 900 MB/s and then drops to about 50 MB/s when the write operation exceeds the size of the cache.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the Crucial P1's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 0.5KB to 8192KB and the total length set to 256MB.
 Crucial P1 500GB |
 ADATA XPG SX8200 240GB |
When tested with ATTO, the Crucial P1's read speeds topped out at about 1,931 MB/s and its write speeds at 927 MB/s.
