Crucial P510 2TB Gen 5 SSD Review – IT’S OVER 9000!

If you want a drive that’ll go OVER 9000, and one that doesn’t break the bank, Crucial’s new P510 might be exactly what you’re looking for. This is just rolling out so if you’re watching this video as it goes live you likely can’t get your hands on one just yet, but by mid to late May it should be widely available and there will be a link to it on Amazon in the description should you fancy picking one up yourself. The P510 isn’t what you’d call a “full fat” PCIe Gen 5 drive, it’s a more ‘skimmed’ version, much like the early crop of Gen 4 drives. This is more like an overclocked Gen 4 drive than a ‘true’ Gen 5 drive at least in terms of performance – although that’s not to diminish just how fast this thing is. It is insane.

Physically the drive is pretty simple. It’s a single sided 2280 drive that comes in just four versions, 1 or 2 terabyte capacity and with or without a heatsink. I’ve got the 2TB version, sans heatsink, which is my preferred choice anyway since most motherboards have hefty heatsinks built in anyway. It also makes it easier to peel off the sticker and see what’s lurking beneath. Somewhat unsurprisingly it’s a pretty simple drive under here too. A Phison E31 dramless PCIe Gen 5 controller, two packages of Micron (Crucial’s parent company) Gen 9 276 layer 3D TLC NAND flash. Each of these packages are 1 terabyte each, assumedly the drive is able to write to these in parallel too as Micron’s marketing for this G9 NAND claims a peak of 3.6GB/s, while the box for this P510 claims up to 10GB/s in reads – although Crucial’s other marketing actually claims up to 11GB/s in reads – so we’ll just have to test this out to see what it can actually do. Interestingly, littered across the board are a bunch of Diode Incorporated PI2SSD chips that let the controller multiplex (or demux) access to more ports on the flash. There’s four of these, which isn’t something I’ve seen on an SSD like this before. I wonder if part of that is for signal integrity as we see on motherboards with Phison’s PCIe redriver chips. 

Anyway, after sticking the drive into the direct-to-CPU slot for the best performance, connected to a 14600K, I first tried seeing the straight copy rate from a RAMDISK, which should just about be faster than the drive itself at least on reads from it and writes to the P510 – which is wild for an SSD – and while I can only copy just under 20GB of data from the RAM disk, it copies to the P510 at over 4GB/s. That’s not exactly the 10-11GB/s promised, but dayum it’s fast. Looking at some synthetic tests, starting with CystalDiskMark, you can see that yes, in fact, this is the fastest drive I’ve tested. Now that’s a bit of a hollow victory, being the only Gen 5 drive I’ve had in, but still. I didn’t quite get the claimed ratings, at 8.6GB/s in writes and 9.2GB/s in reads, but that is two gigabytes per second clear of every other drive I’ve tested, so it’s safe to say it’s fast. Interestingly with a queue depth of one, while the P510 retains its leadership position in writes, reads are kind of poor, at least for a Gen 5 drive. Two of the Gen 4 drives I’ve tested, the SK Hynix P41 and Solidigm P44 Pro offer faster read performance which is quite a surprise. With a random 4 KB block size and a queue depth of 32 we see… Well, pretty shocking performance really. Crucial’s own P310 is actually faster in reads, and three other gen 4 drives offer both faster reads and writes – including one with a very significant margin. At least with a queue depth of one we get more sensible results – save for the P310 still outperforming the P510 in writes. At least the P510 is (just) the fastest drive I’ve tested in reads here. 

As for AS SSD, that always reports lower figures and as expected we get lower results here. The P510 is still the fastest drive I’ve tested, although at least for writes – not by as much as you’d hope. 6.9GB/s in writes and 8 GB/s in reads. Fastest for sure, but not lightyears ahead. With a 4K block size, at least on writes the P510 does just edge out the P310, but only by just 7 MB/s. Reads aren’t as impressive though, with a whole bunch of drives outperforming the P510. With 64 threads you’ll get a bunch more performance at 4.4GB/s in writes and 3GB/s in reads, but that isn’t the fastest I’ve seen. Sabrent’s Rocket 4 Plus and Plus G offer better writes, and the latter better reads too. 

The weirdest result by far was from ATTO Disk Benchmark. I re-ran this multiple times with the drive in differing conditions (ie part full, formatted, restarted to run trim, everything I could think of to make sure) but regardless it gave me this. Obviously we get excellent overall performance at the top end and with larger file size blocks – just nipping 10GB/s on reads, although it drops to more like 9GB/s on anything over 8MB blocks, and around 9GB/s in writes more stably –  but I can’t help but notice that rather significant delay in read performance compared to basically every other drive. Performance starts perking up around 8KB, peaking around 64KB, but this doesn’t START rising until 64KB and peaks at 256KB. What’s even more confusing is the wrote performance which is top-of-the-pack basically the entire time. This drive loves writes, and hates reads. Interesting…

The most confusing thing by far here is my file duplication stress test. That shows not only the simultaneous read and write performance, but also lets us see how big the SLC cache is. On this drive… That’s a little complicated. See bare duplication performance was around 3GB for the first 70GB or so before dropping to around 2GB/s. 3GB/s is a new record, beating the P310’s 2.3GB/s or so, although the confusing thing is this. I kept duplicating files, and it kept running at around 1.3GB/s consistently. What’s weirder is the more I copied, the faster it got. It was back up to 2.1GB/s consistently after writing almost the entire drive (in one go I might add)! Usually we see a precipitous drop in performance at some point, but this just keeps going. I literally ran out of room on the drive before I could find a noticeable drop in performance. That is impressive. 

Funnily enough it seems like the NAND flash’s performance is both this drive’s strongest AND weakest point. The NAND itself, especially without a DRAM cache, doesn’t appear to be able to live up to the PCIe Gen 5 interface’s bandwidth, but it also seems to have absolutely incredible bare-NAND performance. No matter how much you fill up this drive, you’re going to have a high end (empty) Gen 4 drive worth of performance, and considering this is essentially a ‘budget’ Gen 5 drive, that might actually be the ideal selling point. This drive is about £30 more than a good Gen 4 drive with the same capacity, and has the potential bottleneck of needing a Gen 5 compatible motherboard to put it in – think Ryzen 7000 series or newer, or Intel Core Ultra 200S (unless you run your GPU at x8 on a 13th of 14th gen) – so realistically you’re probably still better off getting a good Gen 4 drive (like the P310 to be honest), but if you want to future proof a little extra and are willing to part with the cash, this does look like a really impressive drive – especially for the money.