Crucial Enters The NVMe Arena With New P1 SSD Series

SATA-based SSDs are an easy choice if the option is between one and mechanical storage, but at this point in time, it feels like NVMe has become ubiquitous in this space. If you build a PC today, there’s really no reason not to opt for the faster storage, as long as the price premium for the model you’re looking at isn’t unreasonable. $20 or so seems well worth it to me to improve IOPS performance, as well as quadruple the bandwidth.

As ubiquitous as NVMe might be, memory mainstay Crucial hasn’t offered a model built around the form-factor until now. That’s really surprising to me, since the company’s SATA SSDs are very good – I used two MX500s in our test beds for quite some time, until I needed a storage space boost.

Crucial’s NVMe drought ends this week as the company has just unveiled the simply named “P1”. This drive isn’t targeting the top-end of the market, but instead seeks out users who want better than SATA performance, but don’t want to pay a sizable premium to get the best of the best. Performance is still a lot better than SATA: 2,000 MB/s read and 1,700 MB/s write.

OK, so there’s a big caveat I’m ignoring here: that rated performance is for the 1TB model. If you go the P1 500GB route, you’ll have a drive that delivers almost half of the write performance, 950 MB/s, but almost as much read performance, 1,900 MB/s. Compared to the competition that’s out there, the 500GB P1 isn’t exactly jumping out at us, but at the right price, the 1TB model looks like it would be a solid choice.

Based on the pricing, these are likely QLC drives, meaning that they probably shouldn’t be used in any scenario where writes happen in greater numbers than a normal user would see. These drives will surely last you years, but QLC does add a little bit of concern for those who thrash their drives all day long.

Crucial’s new P1 is already available from its own website, and from Amazon. Current pricing has the 1TB model sitting at $219.99, and the 500GB, at $109.99.