Micron Reveals Budget Crucial P3 Plus SSDs: PCIe 4.0 x4 with 3D QLC NAND

Micron has introduced two new inexpensive M.2-2280 SSD families aimed at budget PCs. But while Micron's Crucial P3 Plus and P3 SSDs are meant to be reasonably priced, they still promise capacities of up to 4TB and rather serious sequential read performance of up to 5,000 MB/s.

Micron's Crucial P3 drives feature a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface as well as sequential read/write speeds of up to 3500/3000 MB/s, which is very close to what flagship PCIe Gen3 drives tend to offer. Micron's Crucial P3 Plus SSDs use a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface and provide sequential read/write speeds of up to 5000/4200 MB/s, which is significantly lower than performance numbers typically offered by PCIe Gen4 drives.

The manufacturer does not disclose which controllers its Crucial P3 and Crucial P3 Plus drives use, but considering the fact that they use simplistic heat spreaders (presumably made of graphene), we are not talking about something very sophisticated and power hungry. Meanwhile, the drives are based on Micron's 176-layer 3D QLC NAND memory, which will allow the company to price them aggressively.

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"For users that have been waiting to upgrade their PCs to Gen4 SSDs, the wait is over," said Teresa Kelley, vice president and general manager of Micron’s Commercial Products Group. "With the forthcoming availability of the new Crucial P3 Plus SSD, anyone seeking high-performance SSDs can upgrade to NVMe Gen4 storage and affordably futureproof their PC. Both the Crucial P3 Plus and P3 SSD products will strengthen our overall SSD portfolio and NVMe product category by offering competitive choices for high-performance storage that enables users to get more done in less time."

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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

2 Comments Comment from the forums

mikeebb

Backward compatibility? I have a 10th gen Intel in a MSI Pro motherboard (LGA1200 so no upgrades) that's full of SATA3 drives (moved from back stock & an older computer). Some of them will be reaching EOL soon and the motherboard can accept a couple of PCI3 drives.
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HENREX2000

mikeebb said:
Backward compatibility? I have a 10th gen Intel in a MSI Pro motherboard (LGA1200 so no upgrades) that's full of SATA3 drives (moved from back stock & an older computer). Some of them will be reaching EOL soon and the motherboard can accept a couple of PCI3 drives.
You can still use it in a gen 3 slot, it just won't achieve full speed
But you should consider buying a higher end gen 3 (e.g. SN750 (non-SE) or 970 EVO Plus) instead of a budget gen 4 since these budget drives usually don't have DRAM cache and thus have shorter lifespan
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