Get the Crucial P2 NVMe SSD - 2TB for £117 (was £166) Get the Crucial P2 NVMe SSD - 1TB for £63 (was £86)
So why is the Crucial P2 worth considering? Well, outside of the price - which is crazy-low, by the way - the P2 is a genuinely decent performer. Its sequential read speeds (2400MB/s) are about 4.4 times faster than even the best SATA SSDs from the likes of Samsung and Kingston, and write speeds are about 3.4 times faster (1900MB/s).
Its random I/O is less competitive, and Crucial annoyingly don’t publish the exact IOPS figures for the 1TB and 2TB sizes - I’ve only been able to find IOPS counts for the 250GB and 500GB models, where performance was quite average. That suggests that performance in tasks like loading games and booting operating systems will be fairly modest, although you’re unlikely to see worse results than on a similarly-priced SATA drive.
More annoyingly, Crucial have swapped the original TLC-based drive with one that uses QLC NAND, without updating the product name. That means you should expect worse performance than indicated in our 2021 review, especially in sustained read/write scenarios where TLC NAND can outperform QLC more noticeably. However, QLC does allow Crucial to use fewer chips to build each drive, which in turn pushes the price down - so it’s likely that we wouldn’t see such deep discounts on TLC-based drives.
In any case, the Crucial P2 remains a good choice for lower-end laptops and desktops, and for rapid access to large files - think 4K videos or disc ISOs. If that sounds helpful to you, then this is a great drive! For your computer’s main drive where your operating system will be installed though, you may wish to go for one of the drives we’ve identified as being the best for gaming.
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