Another day, another SSD going for an almost unbelievably low price. We've really seen solid state storage prices tumble down in recent years, and it seems they're not done yet with this Crucial P3 Plus drive going for $225 at Amazon for four terabytes of storage.
Crucial's P3 Plus is an NVMe SSD best used to store heaps of game installation files, or perhaps video content. It's not the sort of drive we'd recommend as your primary storage, as it's generally using QLC NAND and a slower controller than other contemporary PCIe 4.0 drives, but it's cheaper than say a 4TB WD_Black SN850X.
A whole lot cheaper.
At $225, you're getting plenty of gigabytes for your money. In our review of the 2TB version of this drive, we said it just wasn't cheap enough at $179. Well, double the storage capacity for just 25% more cash is a deal we actually like quite a lot, as any misgivings we had about the drive's performance at its original price fade away.
Like I say, though, this isn't the fastest drive around. It's a PCIe 4.0 SSD rated to 4,800MB/s sequential read and 4,100MB/s sequential write. The thing to note is that these speeds will deteriorate once the SLC cache is all filled up—that's essentially a part of the QLC NAND capacity provisioned to act as SLC NAND storage for faster transfers.
In a 4TB drive such as this, there's actually quite a significant amount of storage that can be provisioned as faster SLC NAND, providing you haven't filled it all the way up, thus preventing the need to turn to the much slower QLC NAND all that often. Though when it is filled up, expect performance to drop off a cliff. QLC is pretty slow.
Here are our benchmarks for the 2TB drive. Performance will differ slightly but should be roughly similar overall.
But still, we suspect that during most general use, and with an eye to leaving some storage on the P3 Plus free at any given time, we suspect most gamers will not run into any sort of issue here in terms of gaming performance. The 2TB Crucial P3 Plus importantly retained pretty good scores across our benchmarking suite, and doesn't run all that hot, either.
There are better SSDs out there, like Crucial's T700 at 12,000MB/s, but for a secondary game library drive, we like the value that the P3 Plus is currently offering a whole lot.
