Crucial's First NVMe SSD: P1 M.2 With QLC NAND
by Billy Tallis on October 16, 2018 12:00 PM EST
Micron's consumer-oriented Crucial brand is finally entering the world of NVMe SSDs with the new Crucial P1 M.2 SSD. The P1 is an entry-level NVMe drive using four bit per cell (QLC) NAND flash memory and the Silicon Motion SM2263 controller. This is the same basic formula as used in the Intel 660p, the only other consumer QLC drive on the market so far. Micron has brought their own firmware customizations, so while the performance characteristics are similar to the Intel 660p they are definitely not the same drive. The Crucial P1 has slightly lower usable capacities than the Intel 660p, which translates into slightly more spare area available for garbage collection and SLC caching. Unlike the Intel 660p, the Crucial P1 uses the same 1GB DRAM per 1TB NAND ratio as most MLC and TLC SSDs.
| Crucial P1 SSD Specifications | |||||
| Capacity | 500 GB | 1 TB | 2 TB | ||
| Form Factor | single-sided M.2 2280 | double-sided M.2 2280 | |||
| Interface | NVMe 1.3 PCIe 3.0 x4 | ||||
| Controller | Silicon Motion SM2263 | ||||
| NAND Flash | Micron 64L 3D QLC NAND | ||||
| DRAM | 512MB DDR3 | 1GB DDR3 | 2GB DDR4 | ||
| Sequential Read | 1900 MB/s | 2000 MB/s | 2000 MB/s | ||
| Sequential Write | 950 MB/s | 1700 MB/s | 1750 MB/s | ||
| Random Read | 90k IOPS | 170k IOPS | 250k IOPS | ||
| Random Write | 220k IOPS | 240k IOPS | 250k IOPS | ||
| SLC Write Cache (approximate) | 5GB min 50GB max |
12GB min 100GB max |
24GB min 200GB max |
||
| Power | Max | 8W | |||
| Idle | 2mW (PS4), 80mW (PS3) | ||||
| Warranty | 5 years | ||||
| Write Endurance | 100 TB 0.1 DWPD |
200 TB 0.1 DWPD |
400 TB 0.1 DWPD |
||
| MSRP | $109.99 (22¢/GB) | $219.99 (22¢/GB) | TBA | ||
With top sequential speeds of only 2GB/s, the Crucial P1 doesn't really need all four PCIe lanes, but Silicon Motion's entry-level SM2263 controller still has four instead of the two that some other low-end NVMe controllers use. Given the use of QLC NAND, the P1's SLC cache is far more important than it is on drives with TLC NAND. Micron has taken a similar approach to what Intel did with the 660p by making the SLC cache not just a write buffer but a full-time dynamically sized read and write cache. All data written to the Crucial P1 hits the SLC cache first, and is compacted into QLC blocks only when the drive's free space starts running low. This means that a mostly-empty drive will be using tens or hundreds of GB of SLC, but as it fills up the cache will shrink down to just 5-24GB depending on the model. All of Crucial's official performance specifications are for the SLC cache.
As with the Crucial MX series of SATA SSDs, the Crucial P1 features a greater degree of power loss protection than typical consumer SSDs, though not the fully capacitor-backed protection that most enterprise SSDs feature. With the MX500, Crucial had already substantially reduced the number of capacitors required for their partial power loss protection thanks in part to a reduction in write power requirements for their 64-layer 3D NAND. The P1 gains additional data security from its SLC-first write policy, which eliminates the partially-programmed page risk. However, there is still a tiny bit of used data buffered in volatile RAM, on the order of a few MB at the most.
The rated write endurance of 0.1 drive writes per day is low even for an entry-level consumer SSD, but given the large drive capacities it is adequate. The P1 is definitely not intended to be the workhorse of an enthusiast system with a write-heavy workload, but for more typical read-oriented workloads it offers better performance than SATA SSDs.
The initial MSRPs for the Crucial P1 are unimpressive: it's substantially more expensive than the Intel 660p, and about matches some of the most affordable high-end NVMe drives like the HP EX920 and ADATA SX8200. If Micron can catch up to Intel's pricing and compete for the lowest $/GB among all NVMe SSDs then the Crucial P1 has a shot at success.
The 2TB model will be launching slightly later due to using DDR4 DRAM instead of the DDR3 used by the 500GB and 1TB models. We are testing the 1TB Crucial P1, with some results already in our Bench database. Look for our full review next week.
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TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link
Because 40 years just isnt enough for a PC drive.hojnikb - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
Not only that, but reliability in the past was almost always dependant on controller and not flash.deil - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link
this is clearly laptop drive. Once installed most users will use maybe 20 GB per day. With 1 TB of space, its still 10 years before drive will bust. Way more than CPU/GPU will be sufficient.TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link
The drive "busting" is also not a guarantee. This has been proven multiple times over, that TBW isnt an exact science. MLC drives have hit as much as 2 petabyte written before keeling over. Techreport's worst drive still lasted nearly twice its TBW rating.JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link
Oh joys. The idiots whining about write endurance are back making a ruckus about a problem that never existed with their workloads.Do tell, how many drive(s) have failed on you due to NAND endurance failing?
PeachNCream - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
Two and counting. Both planar MLC. The good thing is that you can still generally recover your data which is unlike a click of death failure on a mechanical disk. You and TheinsanegamerN seem uninformed on the rate at which P/E is exhausted under even what are fairly light workloads.hojnikb - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
And how exactly did you figure out NAND wore out and not the controller crapping out ?It was very common with some models in the past to just die (like vertex series and recently some Phison S10 drives) but the culprint was the never NAND but controller just dying.
PeachNCream - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
After popping the drives into an external case, I was able to pull my data off them. Creating new partitions was possible, but OS installation resulted in corrupted files and a non-functional system. Perhaps that was a controller problem, but it seems unlikely since reads were fine.philehidiot - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link
This really is a stupid product - look at the just released Corsair MP510. At ~the same capacity (480GB Vs 500GB) the endurance of the MP510 is 4x as high and instead of just 0.1 DWPD they're verging on 1 DWPD. That's before you get to the speed of the thing. The overall increase in cost? $15. If the difference was $50-100 then I could see why you'd strongly consider this for a storage drive for media or something but with this reliability combined with a price very near high end competition it's basically a non-product for anyone who cares to do any research. Random read... 90K IOPS Vs 360K IOPS for $15 more...It may be that this is a perfectly sound product for average users but even then I'd be asking the question of why take the risk? A lower endurance is almost certainly going to lead to a lower MTBF. I'm currently looking for an SSD with high capacity for low use (i've got a failing WD Raptor HDD and an ancient Intel SSD which is approaching EOL and I don't particularly want to lose the data) and even for this use case, the lower endurance for saving such a relative pittance just doesn't make a sensible argument.
chrcoluk - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
you get it.They priced it slightly lower so people not in the know buy it looking for the cheapest drive, without realising they getting a vastly inferior product for that slight saving, in the meanwhile the vendor makes more profit as QLC is cheaper to produce.