Get the 1TB Crucial P5 Plus for £126 (was £157)
The P5 Plus hasn’t had the honour of an RPS review just yet, but the drive is a faster follow-up to the popular Crucial P5 which we’ve recommended in deals before. That was a PCIe 3.0 drive capable of 3400MB/s at its best, so you’re getting nearly double the performance here for way less than double the price. That translates particularly well in creative tasks like video editing or 3D rendering, where you often are working with very large files - having a PCIe 4.0 SSD will speed things up to an incredible degree. There’s also an advantage for gaming, as load times are marginally decreased compared to PCIe 3.0 games, but this is expected to become even more of a game-changer once Microsoft’s DirectStorage API is adopted by PC games over the next few years. To get the full speed of these drives, you’ll need to use them with a desktop PC or laptop that supports the new PCIe 4.0 spec. This includes most motherboards and laptops made over the past two years, but you can always Google the name of your motherboard or laptop plus “PCIe 4.0” to find out for sure. Thankfully, if you’re planning to upgrade down the road but only have standard PCIe 3.0 for now, these drives will still work just fine, just at slightly reduced speeds. As mentioned in the introduction, this drive also meets Sony’s strict speed requirements to be installed inside a PS5. This allows you to expand the rather limited 667GB of usable space available with the PS5 Disc or PS5 Digital. As the drive is incredibly fast and low latency, you can actually install and play PS5 native apps from the SSD, something not possible with external drives connected via USB. Sony recommend a heatsink; I’ve tested and can confirm this one from QIVYNSRY works just fine. Of course, you might also want a heatsink for using the drive in a PC to make sure sustained performance remains high. I think that just about does it. In short: this is the cheapest we’ve ever seen a drive of this speed by a good £25 margin, so do jump on it while it lasts.
