While we tested Crucial's P5 Plus series sometime ago, nowadays, Crucial offers apart from the barebone PCIe NVME SSD, versions with pre-installed passive heatsink to offer users more buying options. Today we will examine the Crucial 2TB P5 Plus NVME SSD. The Crucial P5 Plus is a fast PCIe Gen4 series drive sporting Micron's 176-layer 3D TLC NAND resulting in read speeds up to 6600MB/s, which is up to 67% faster random read and 40% faster random write performance over prior Crucial Gen3 SSDs.

The new P5 Plus series with a passive heatsink can be used with PS5 gaming consoles

and of course with all Intel and AMD platforms supporting PCIe slots (back to Gen3 system compatibility)

With those new drives, Crucial's firmware supports Microsoft's DirectStorage technology, that when paired with Windows 11 and compatible graphic card hardware can improve the loading times of new games.

The drive has a mean time to failure (MTTF) rating of over 2 million hours, with over 1200TBW written to help ensure its longevity and reliability and 5 years of warranty.

Advanced Features

• Advanced Features
• Dynamic write acceleration
• Redundant array of independent NAND (RAIN)
• Multistep data integrity algorithms
• Adaptive thermal protection
• Integrated power loss immunity
• Active garbage collection
• TRIM support
• NVMe standard self monitoring and reporting technology (SMART)
• Error correction code (ECC)
• NVMe autonomous power state transition (APST) support
• Device sleep support
• Full-drive encryption capable (TCG OPAL 2.0)

- Specifications

- The Package/Overview

The Crucial P5 Plus 1TB NVMe SSD comes at a price of ~$165 on Crucial's website. The retail box follows a new design for Crucial NVME products and includes all the needed information.

The product is packaged securely, in a plastic shell and includes also a printed manual

The product has typical dimensions for an M2 2280 NVME drive, while at the heatsink there are the Crucial P5 Plus logos printed.

At the back, you will find all the needed information as serial number and firmware revision.

The Crucial P5 Plus includes Micron's DM02A1 controller and also includes Micron's 176-layer (B47R) 3D TLC NAND flash, while there is also 1GB Micron of LPDDR4 DRAM chip that is used for caching.

- Installation

Not much to be said here, just get the drive and plug it into an empty NVMe slot. In some boards you have to change Bios settings to Storage: PCIe in order to get the drive recognized. Before we start our tests, we can get some info for the drive via the Crucial Storage Executive software, the latest firmware has been already installed. Also, the P5 Plus is running at PCIE x4 speed.

Over the SMART tab, we can find more information

The CrystalDiskInfo software gives us more details:

while the expected free space after formatting the drive under Windows 11 is around 1.81TB of empty space.