Also on board are a Gigabyte GC-Alpine Thunderbolt 3 card and Softperfect’s Ramdisk 3.4.6, which is used for the 48GB transfer tests. Testing is performed on Windows 10 64-bit running on a Core i7-5820K/Asus X99 Deluxe system with four 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an Asmedia ASM2142 USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) card. Unless of course you consider Kingston’s mid-range KC2500: Its synthetic benchmark tests aren’t as impressive as those of other drives, but it rocks in long transfers. Regardless of when a slowdown happens, it does happen with most mid-range drives– so there’s still a reason to go for a pro-level drive. The winner here, Seagate’s outstanding FireCuda 520, is a top-tier drive.
The P5 ran out of cache during our 450GB write tests, as do most mid-range NVMe SSDs. SLC cache is simply writing the cell as an off/on binary voltage, rather than the more refined and error-prone voltage required to represent a 2-bit (MLC), 3-bit (TLC), or 4-bit (QLC) value. This augments the primary DRAM cache (1GB per 1TB of NAND). The P5 utilizes a Micron-designed controller and 96-layer TLC (Triple-Level Cell/3-bit) NAND, various amounts of which are allocated dynamically as secondary SLC cache. A single NAND chip, instead of the two or more with larger capacities, doesn’t have as many data lines. This is common across the industry in that capacity. Note that the 250GB version is rated for half the write speed of the larger versions. Those prices are pretty much on track for a mid-range NVMe SSD. The P5 is available in four capacities: 250GB ( $63 on Amazon), 500GB ( $87 on Amazon), the 1TB we tested ( $180 on Amazon), and 2TB ( $400 on Amazon). Go there for information on competing products and how we tested them. This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best SSDs. It’s not the drive you want for extremely long writes, but otherwise-it hauls the freight. I was wrong: The P5 was strictly upper-crust with normal workloads, and actually took home first prize in one test. Having reviewed both Crucial’s P1 and P2 bargin NVMe SSD’s, I expected more of the same middling performance from the new P5.
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