Crucial P310: (80mm) cheap newcomer with QLC
QLC NAND SSDs, which have low endurance but should allow for lower prices, have recently been improving in performance more and more, which is the second main criticism of this type of memory. Recently there was the cheap Kingston NV3 SSD, which will apparently feature both QLC and TLC NAND versions, now a new Crucial P310 drive is coming to market. And this module is seemingly the fastest QLC SSD ever to come out so far.
It’s only partially true that this SSD is a newly launched hardware – Crucial released the P310 model back during the summer holidays, but initially only as an SSD for handheld gaming devices, i.e. as a short module in the M.2 2230 design. But even though this SSD uses QLC NAND memory, the performance came out pretty decent and the SSD was quite highly regarded in reviews. As mentioned, this is probably the best performing QLC NAND based SSD. Perhaps because of this, Crucial (or Micron, the company behind the brand) has now started offering a general-purpose version of the module in the standard M.2 2280 design that fits desktop PCs and most laptops, so this SSD can already be used universally.
The Crucial P310 is an SSD with a PCI Express 4.0×4 interface and it can actually utilise it fully. The top-capacity models achieve sequential reads of up to 7100 MB/s and sequential writes of up to 6000 MB/s – this is as usual while writing to the pseudoSLC cache. The sustainable write speed after its exhaustion is, according to the ComputerBase test, around 300 MB/s (which is still significantly higher than, for example, the previous Crucial P3 and P3 Plus). Other reviews of the short 2230 version have been done by ServeTheHome or Tom’s Hardware. Unfortunately, the manufacturer does not list random access values in the parameters on the e-shop, but the press release does – according to it, the Crucial P310 achieves up to 1,000,000 IOPS in random reads and up to 1,200,000 IOPS in random writes.
Three capacities are available – 500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB. There is no 4TB model yet (you would expected a QLC series to offer one), but it is possible that it will appear later. Both the 1TB and 2TB models are supposed to achieve full performance with the above numbers, but the 500GB version is a bit slower due to limited NAND die parallelism – Crucial lists 6600 MB/s sequential read and 3500 MB/s sequential write for it (random access values may probably be reduced as well).
The SSD is based on 232-layer QLC-type 3D NAND, which is unsurprisingly from Micron. These are 1Tb chips, so the lowest model only contains four. The controller used is the Phison E27T, a four-channel DRAMless controller that makes the SSD cheaper and can even reduce power consumption, in theory at least. So instead of a cache, an HMB (Hybrid Memory Buffer dedicated in part of the RAM of the computer) is used.
The modules come with a five-year warranty, but as you might expect, QLC NAND leads to a relatively low guaranteed TBWs, which comes out to just 220 total cycles per cell. Thus, the 500GB version guarantees only 110 TB of total writes, the 1TB module 220 TB and the 2TB module 440 TB of total writes. Due to the limited endurance, this SSD is best suited as a second module in a computer. It can handle the role of a system SSD in terms of performance, but in that role you may have to worry more about the longevity.
Crucial has set prices of 50 USD, 85 USD and 140 USD for each capacity in the company’s official store, which would be 54 EUR, 87 EUR and 152 EUR (after VAT). The store only lists versions without a cooler, but the photos also show a module with a hetsink, so it’s possible that such a modification will also be for sale separately.
But the above prices do not necessarily reflect the real figures at regular etailers, which are often much better than what the manufacturer officially communicates. In Germany, 2280 Crucial P310 modules have already appeared at lower prices, so hopefully things are heading that way. However, be careful when you make purchases and always check whether you have correctly chosen the classic long version (2280) or the version for handhelds (2230) depending on device you are getting the SSD for. You can’t install the short 30mm version into most desktop boards and you will also have trouble getting a heatsink on 2230 module.
Sources: Crucial, ComputerBase
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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