INTRODUCTION

   Well after almost a year in delays it seems that the market is finally gearing up to welcome consumer oriented PCIe 5.0 Gen5 M.2 NVMe SSDs which always according to manufacturers will not face the same issues as their early attempts. Honestly i don't know if that will be the case or even when we'll finally see a good number of PCIe 5.0 Gen5 models released in the market, what i do know for certain however is that PCIe 4.0 Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSDs have become fast enough to cover most if not all consumers, even demanding ones. Crucial is one of those companies that their newest products seem to fly beneath the radar (most of the times anyways) and in my case this applied for their latest P3 Plus line of PCIe 4.0 Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSDs and to make up for my delay in getting one in the lab today I’ll be testing the 4TB variant.

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   The latest P3 Plus 4TB M.2 NVMe SSD by Crucial is the 3rd model to arrive in the lab that makes uses of PHISON's 4-channel (ARM Cortex-R5 single processor) PS5021-E21 NVMe v1.4 DRAM-less NAND flash controller paired with Micron's 176-layer 3D QLC NAND flash (N48R). As mentioned in past reviews the PS5021-E21 NAND flash controller by PHISON features their 4th Gen LDPC engine (low-density parity check) along with end-to-end data path protection, Host Memory Buffer (HMB) architecture support (a fraction of your PC's system memory is used to cache mapping tables - only supported on versions of Windows 10/11 launched from 2019 and beyond), wear levelling, low power mode, thermal monitoring (70 degrees Celsius limit), TRIM, bad block management, static/dynamic range SLC cache and SmartECC 2.0 (RAID ECC) and fully supports AES-256bit hardware encryption (with SHA512 and RSA4096) along with TCG Opal 2.0 and Pyrite. As for endurance Crucial reports an TBW of 800 for the 4TB model and covers the entire line with a 5-year limited warranty.