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.
Micron's Crucial P3 Plus and P3 SSDs will be available later this summer.
