INTRODUCTION

   2.5 inch SATA III SSDs (solid state drives) may still hold the highest sales number (as mentioned many times before in our reviews this is largely due to their compatibility with older systems) but thanks to the NVMe breakthrough roughly two years ago M.2 drives may turn that around sooner than we had initially thought. This is not a surprise of course since the consumer market is slowly but steadily getting flooded with M.2 NVMe models by virtually every storage manufacturer regardless of size and market share. Of course at the same time NAND controller and NAND flash manufacturers frequently launch new products in order to keep up with demand for high-performance, durability and low-cost SSD lines. Crucial was pretty much the last large manufacturer to enter the consumer NVMe market with their recently released P1 model and so today we're testing the 1TB variant.

   Crucial.com is a leading online retailer specializing in computer memory (RAM) and solid state drives (SSD), and is operated by a subsidiary of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the world's leading manufacturers of computer memory products. Crucial.com offers more than 250,000 compatible products for nearly every computer system: home and business, old and new, PC and Mac® computers. Utilizing a suite of easy-to-use, free online tools, including the Crucial® System Scanner and the Crucial Memory Advisor™ tool, crucial.com makes it easy to find a compatible upgrade to improve computer performance and restore system reliability.

   The P1 is the very first consumer oriented M.2 NVMe model released by Crucial (currently available in 500GB/1TB/2TB capacities) and uses the SM2263EN quad channel high-performance PCIe Gen3 x4 controller (NVMe v1.3 protocol) by Silicon Motion along with Micron's 64-layer 3D QLC NAND flash and 1GB LPDDR3 RAM again by Micron. The Silicon Motion SM2263EN quad channel controller may not be their fastest one to date (the SM2262EN holds that spot currently) but it still offers sequential read and write numbers of up to 2400-1700 MB/s and random read and write IOPS of up to 300-250K (the P1 1TB however is advertised with read/write performance numbers of up to 2000-1700MB/s and read/write IOPS of 170-240k). The SM2263EN also supports several technologies including NANDXtend (error-correcting with data protection), end to end data protection with SRAM ECC, S.M.A.R.T, TRIM, NCQ, thermal-throttling, active garbage collection, DevSleep (device sleep), SLC write acceleration (algorithms for optimal sustained performance - depending on free space up to 100GB is used as SLC cache), AES-256bit hardware encryption and TCG Opal. Crucial also reports an MTTF of 1.5 million hours and write endurance numbers of 100TBW for the 500GB model, 200TBW for the 1TB model and 400TBW for the 2TB model (all models are covered by a 5 year limited warranty).