The Cheapest Gen4 SSD, but at what Cost?

hi everyone otter here and today I'm going to talk about crucial's latest SSD the P3 plus now this is supposed to be the absolute cheapest Gen 4 nvme SSD on the market which means that they definitely had to cut a few Corners here and there to keep that price down nevertheless crucial still seems very convinced that their new generation of memory chips will offer a very competitive performance and that is exactly what we're going to check today so without further Ado let's begin this video is brought to you by seasonic and their Prime series power supplies these top quality power supplies are very efficient they're whisper quiet extremely reliable and my go-to choice for most of my test Rigs and builds around here and to make the deal even sweeter seasonik wraps it all up in a cozy 12 year long warranty check them out using the links in the description below the P3 plus will be available in capacities from 500 gigabytes up to 4 terabytes and I have the two terabyte version right here in the box you get the SSD itself and a small screw for installing it on your motherboard which is great in my opinion because even though you do get them with your motherboard they are very easy to lose and they're such a pain to have to order again there's no heatsink included and you get an acronis license to clone your current drive if you want to do that but I always prefer a clean installation instead now the P3 plus itself is about as straightforward as an SSD can be it comes with a simple black sticker that looks decent and that will fit any build that has the drive out in the open and under that sticker is the controller and some flash memory that's it there's no dram added and all of the memory is on one side which is great for some laptops that won't fit thicker ssds that have modules on both sides or at least this is the case with this particular one and the smaller capacities I assume because the four terabyte model might be be different but when it comes to features and specs crucial is actually not being very open about it they mentioned it's a Gen 4 nvme SSD and they State what the sequential performance should be but they're not really giving any other technical details at all they're not even mentioning if they're using 4-bit qlc memory or not so I kind of did send them a message and I asked about that a bit more but all I got back was this very vague response they said the P3 plus is designed around qlc nand and they may change components depending on their own Supply but they will always meet the performance specification now this is pretty much the same response you will get from any other SSD manufacturer so it's not that unusual but since they are not sharing any specs on their website it does give them a lot of freedom to change parts around that personally I just prefer first seeing a higher and more consistent standard when it comes to any product anyway let's check out that performance now as always I'm going to start with the PC Mark 10 quick Benchmark which is a very useful Benchmark for anyone that is looking to add a second SSD to their system it is a collection of tests so they'll replicate all those little light tasks that we do with our PCS every single day so those are the things like working with photos with documents loading games and so on and since this is a qlc ish Drive I do expect a lot of people to use this as a secondary drive for these simple tasks and the P3 plus ends up roughly in the middle of the pack it's a bit ahead of the most gen 3 TLC ssds like the Samsung 980 and the WD blue sn570 and it's actually ahead of other qlc drives like the Gen 4 sabrant rocket Q4 and the Gen 3 Corsair mp400 but it is slower than most typical TLC based Gen 4 drives and keep in mind some of those are usually pretty cheap as well including the adata S70 blade and crucial's own P5 plus as a dram was Drive latency looks a bit better with the P3 plus now matching the P5 plus and being only just behind the S70 blade but if latency is somehow really important to you the sn770 in a ddr5 system like my test bench is still significantly faster now the full PC Mark 10 Suite is a great Benchmark for anyone that is looking for a new main drive or perhaps run some applications that are very heavy on the SSD it is a bit more intense and it is supposed to replicate a more serious and a more constant use of your system and of your drive itself and the P3 plus held up quite well here it added ended up leaving several other Gen 4 drives behind even some TLC based ones while being just behind a sabrant rocket 4 plus and the Samsung 980 Pro now this is a pretty good result for a budget Drive even if it's still clearly behind performance focused drives like dkc 3000 or the sn850 again it's good to keep an eye on the crucial P5 plus here that is significantly faster while still being on the affordable side the multi-hour long consistency test is usually where cheaper drives struggle especially the qlc ones and keep in mind that this is the test that really stresses the drive for a really long time and basically just pushes it to its limits so it's not this sort of a workload you would buy a P3 plus 4 but it is still nice to see how a drive can handle this test and here the P3 plus is definitely on the lower end of the graph with most Gen4 ssds and even the better gen 3 ssds ahead of it that being said an average bandwidth of 209 megabytes per second isn't as bad as we've seen on some other qlc drives like the Corsair mp400 and the sabrin rocket Q4 which really struggled with this test along with the Samsung 980 so it's not great but it's also not horrible either sequential performance on the other hand was quite interesting crucial is claiming that this drive could go up to 4200 megabytes per second in sequential rights but mine actually did about 6 000 megabytes per second the same goes for sequential reads so crucial is claiming 5000 megabytes per second but I measured around 6700 so it is a lot faster than crucial claims and technically that means it passes the 5500 megabyte per second read recommendation that Sony set for their PlayStation 5S but if you're looking for an SSD for your PlayStation I will still recommend you buy one that guarantees those speeds and that includes a dram cache so either the P5 Plus or any of my other recommendations from my Gen 4 Roundup video I'm gonna put the link somewhere up here if you wanna check it out but have a lot of room to room to cut the performance significantly and still stay true to their statement that every product will meet this very basic spec and if that does happen and it also hurts other results in this review that would totally change my opinion of this drive now I'm not saying that they will just go and do this but it is definitely something to keep an eye out for in the future and I'm probably going to buy a retail P3 Plus in a few months or so and see what happens then anyway if you do decide to put it in a PlayStation or to put it in a PC that doesn't come with some sort of a heatsink I really do recommend you buy a separate heatsink to go with it when really stressing this drive the controller approached 90 degrees Celsius on my flare camera and actually reported internal temperatures of over 100 degrees now it's not going to hit that if you're just loading a game or some files but a good eating only cost you about ten dollars or so and it would be just best to get one I'll put some links in the description down below that you can check out overall the P3 plus performs reasonably well especially when you consider it doesn't have dram and possibly uses qlc memory I still wouldn't recommend that type of an SSD for your primary drive but as a secondary drive with a bunch of files you want to load quickly or some games that you want to load fast something like this can be a good option if the price is right now here in the Netherlands it currently costs about the same as the faster and better built P5 plus and then there is obviously no good reason to go for this P3 Plus instead that being said the P3 plus just launched and it is pretty normal for prices to be a bit higher when a new SSD comes out and then they kind of go down over time and keep in mind the price difference needs to be significant to justify skipping the higher end options like the B5 Plus or some other Gen 4 TLC drives a couple of dollars or Euros just won't cut it in my opinion but if you look at the US for example the one terabyte P3 plus costs about 20 dollars less than the P5 plus and personally I would still pick the P5 as a primary drive or when your budget isn't super tight but if you just want some extra storage this is not a bad way to save up some money so as always when you decide to get a new SSD make sure to check all the prices in your region at that moment to see what meets your needs and your wallet best because prices do change all the time and they vary much so depend on the region that's it now thank you all for watching I hope this video was helpful a bit if it was make sure to like it and to subscribe to this channel to never miss an upload bye guys and see in the next one bye [Music]

Channel: Techtesters

Views: 33,871

Keywords: crucial p3 plus review, crucial p3 plus ssd, crucial p3 plus ssd review, best cheap ssd, best budget ssd, best affordable ssd, best budget ssd for pc, cheap ssd for ps5, cheap ssd for pc, p3 plus, p3 plus ssd, crucial p3 ssd, p3 plus vs p5 plus, crucial p3 plus vs crucial p5 plus, crucial p3 plus vs samsung 980, crucial p3 plus vs WD SN570, crucial p3 plus vs WD Black SN770, p3 plus vs sn570, techtesters, budget ssd, crucial p3 plus test, ssd review, ssd test, crucial, p3+

Id: 9vXkq2eMfGA

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Seanspeed]

Seems there's only like a £10-20 difference between this and P5 Plus, so it seems fine, but it's hard to go for the budget options when 'midrange' drives cost not much more at all.

[u/Cubelia]

I'm really puzzling why Crucial went all out with 176L QLC+DRAMless controller. It's just so bad that you should just grab their P5 Plus.

176L TLC with either a solid Gen 3 DRAMless controller or lower end controller will be a better solution, leave Gen 4 alone with high end drive. Kioxia nailed it with their Exceria G2 with competitive price compared to Samsung 980 and WD SN570.

[u/DeliciousIncident]

But is it better than a SATA SSD, say Samsung 860 TLC or something like that?