Top-Speed NVMe SSD with Excellent Lifespan
Review by Erik Vlietinck
A maximum speed for sequential reads up to 6600MB/sec in a PCIe 4.0 compatible workstation and a typical read/write speed of 3300/2700MB per second in a Mac with Thunderbolt 3 or 4, is what Crucial’s P5 Plus NVMe SSD promises.
The P5 Plus NVMe SSD comes in a cardboard box inside a hard plastic protection enclosure that includes a tiny M.2 mounting screw. The 1TB and 2TB versions are the fastest SSDs currently on the market (there’s also a 500GB version with a lower maximum write speed of 4GB/sec).
When you test a Crucial P5 Plus using an external Thunderbolt 3/4 device on any machine supporting it, the maximum performance will not exceed 3000MB/sec because of the upper limit of the Thunderbolt specification. Installed in a workstation, which a friend of mine was kind enough to let me briefly try out, Crucial’s SSD reaches a 6500MB/sec read speed and a 5000MB/sec write speed.
On any system where the Crucial P5 Plus is used in an external enclosure, sequential read performance hovered around 2800MB/sec. You could ask yourself the question then: Why would you buy such a high-performance SSD that’s more expensive than its PCIe 3.0 sibling, the P5, which has excellent performance in Macs as well.
My answer to that question is that the P5 Plus is ready for the future and 33% faster than the P5, so if you have the budget, and there’s a chance you’ll be buying a faster machine that supports PCIe 4.0 within, say, three years, the P5 Plus is a better option.
The Crucial P5 Plus also comes with a limited five-year warranty, and the 2TB version is rated for a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 2 million hours and 1200 TB of TBW (total bytes written). ■
