Crucial’s P5 Plus NVMe SSD is the first high-end PCIe 4.0 drive that I’ve seen crack the $90 barrier for a 2TB model, offering a huge amount of performance and capacity for not that much money. This drive is suitable for both PC and PS5 use (although Sony would like you to use a heatsink, please and thank you) and generally comes highly recommended by those that have tried it, including yours truly.
So, what makes for a good SSD? For me, it’s all about the components. The P5 Plus marries a high-end Micron PCIe 4.0 controller with Micron TLC NAND flash memory, backed up by a 2GB DDR4 DRAM cache. This combination produces good results – up to 6600MB/s sequential reads and 720K IOPS random reads – and places the P5 Plus near the top of the PCIe 4.0 category, behind only some of the very fastest gaming SSDs like the (more expensive) WD SN850X and Samsung 990 Pro.
Given that you’d struggle to find a real-world performance difference between the P5 Plus and these more expensive options, why not go for the affordable choice? That’s what I’ve done in my own system, and it’s what I’m happy to recommend to you too, dear reader.
