Adaptive Thermal Protection:
While PCIe SSDs like the P5 Plus offer impressive performance, they also generate a good amount of heat. To keep them from overheating, Crucial has implemented what they call Adaptive Thermal Protection. This technology monitors the temperature of a drive and will automatically reduce its performance when it reaches a certain point.
While not the hottest SSD we've looked at, the P5 Plus can get get a bit toasty. At idle, temperatures hovered around 50 ºC. When pushed hard, the drive reached temperatures as high as 76 ºC when reading and 74 ºC when writing.
These temperatures had no impact on the P5 Plus' write speeds. However, when it would exceed 76 ºC, Adaptive Thermal Protection would kick in and throttle the drive's sequential read speed. The P5 Plus gradually slowed until its temperature dropped below 76 ºC. Once it reached this point, it would speed back up again.
Final Thoughts:
The Crucial P5 Plus is a great choice for the gamer or creative professional looking for a fast, yet affordable, PCIe 4.0 SSD for their computer or gaming console. Designed and built entirely in-house, this M.2 form factor SSD is powered by Micron's cutting-edge DM01B2 controller and is available with up to 2TB of the company's 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. Combine this with a PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 1.4 interface and you have drive that is capable of performance nearly double that of Crucial's previous PCIe SSDs. The P5 Plus flew through our sequential transfer rate tests, reading at speeds as high as 6,852 MB/s and writing at more than 5,000 MB/s. The drive's performance wasn't quite as impressive when doing random writes. Nevertheless, it was able to produce more than 145,000 IOPS at low queue depths.
Of course, fast read and write speeds aren't the only things the P5 Plus has to offer. In addition to a large DRAM cache, the drive uses technologies like Dynamic Write Acceleration to optimize performance as well as multistep data integrity algorithms and Redundant Array of Independent NAND (RAIN) to protect data and prevent it from becoming corrupted. The P5 Plus also features thermal and power loss protection, active garbage collection, NVMe Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) support and full hardware-based encryption. To top it all off, it comes with Acronis True Image cloning software and is covered by a generous 5 year warranty.
The Crucial P5 Plus is available now in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. Prices on Amazon.com currently range from $108 up to $368, with the 1TB version reviewed here retailing for about $180.
Highs:
- Available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities
- PCIe 4.0 x4 interface with NVMe protocol
- Micron DM02A1 controller
- Equipped with Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND
- Excellent sequential read and write performance
- Good random read and write performance
- Small M.2 2280 form factor
- Large DRAM cache
- Dynamic Write Acceleration
- Supports Redundant Array of Independent NAND and Multistep Data Integrity Algorithms
- Full hardware-based encryption
- Supports TRIM and active garbage collection
- Thermal and power loss protection
- Includes Acronis True Image cloning software
- Reasonably priced
- 5 year warranty
Lows:
- Write speed drops when SLC cache is full
- Gets hot under heavy workloads
