Crucial P310 (2280) SSD Review: Same great taste, but with a new look

The Crucial P310 2280 takes everything we liked about the original Crucial P310 (2230), then stretches it to fit the M.2 2280 form factor. The original 2230’s combination of surprisingly good performance and excellent power efficiency can now be had in a longer package for your desktops and laptops. But there's tons of competition in the 2280 market, so how does the new variant stack up? Budget SSDs continue to surprise us, and the P310 looks to be no different — but there are a lot of rivals in this space.

Yes, you could buy the 2230 version and it will fit most longer M.2 slots — possibly with an adapter for certain laptops. This might even make sense for M.2 2242 hosts, but in general you pay a premium for 2230 drives. This makes a 2280 version of the P310 a pretty good idea, especially from Crucial’s viewpoint. It uses the same hardware, so the drive can remain single-sided and cool-running with essentially no changes. That’s good, as the P310 had good performance for a QLC-based drive, with very high power efficiency. It also means that maybe the drive should be more affordable.

If you’re looking for a budget drive that doesn’t feel like a budget drive, you could do worse than the P310 2280. Its everyday performance feels similar to that of a high-end drive. It does have the dreaded QLC flash that some dislike, but in real world terms and especially with how Crucial has designed this drive, it's often not a big deal. On the other hand, a drive built on QLC flash should be less expensive than its TLC-based peers even if the drives feel similar 99% of the time. The P310’s primary drawback is that with the added competition found in the M.2 2280 form factor, Crucial has to take pricing more seriously.

The Crucial P310 2280, as in the M.2 2230 form factor, comes in 1TB and 2TB capacities. The 2280 variant also offers up a 500GB SKU, which is interesting from a budget perspective but probably more for OEMs that just want a modern SSD as cheap as possible. This makes more sense for the 2280 as the 2230 is more typically used to upgrade existing internal drives that already start at 512GB or more.

Current pricing, now well over a month after the original NDA, comes in $5 below the specified MSRP, but we're in the middle of the holiday shopping madness and prices have fluctuated a lot. The MSRPs for the P310 2280 were far too high and would have made the P310 a pretty bad deal, with targets of $64.99, $94.99, and $149.99 respectively for the 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB SKUs. Current street prices are sitting at $41.99, $71.99, and $144.99.

That's a good sized and necessary price drop of 35% and 25% on the two smaller models, while the largest model, and the one we're reviewing, only sees a current 3.3% discount. However, inventory at some retailers has dried up and we did see pricing as low as $129.99 (13% off) earlier in the month. Considering the competition, the P310 2280 2TB really should be priced closer to $119.99, perhaps even lower, as plenty of good quality TLC drives land in that price range.

In general, we recommend TLC-based drives over QLC models, particularly when pricing is close. TLC is even more important for the low capacity 500GB drive, as that's only 125GB of raw NAND capacity (i.e. pSLC cache) and it's very easy to fill up such a drive so that there's little room for the cache. Drives like the Teamgroup MP44L or WD Blue SN580 are probably a better bet at 500GB. These have a lower performance ceiling, but with so few flash dies you are better off with TLC.

The 1TB price has come down a lot since the initial launch, but reasonable alternatives like the Kingston NV3 and Teamgroup MP44 still undercut the P310 2280. The same goes for 2TB, with the SN580 sitting at $99.99, and drives like the Addlink A93, Silicon Power US75, and MSI M482/M482 Eco-Pack can fall below $100 as well. Crucial has, historically, priced its drives competitively when needed, so we expect prices to come down more on this.

The P310 2280 is not short on performance, at least. It can reach up to 7,100 / 6,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1,000K / 1,200K IOPS random read and write IOPS. This is a ton of performance for a budget drive, although we are talking QLC flash here. Crucial backs the drive with a five-year warranty with up to 220TB of writes per TB capacity.

Crucial P310 Software and Accessories

If you travel to Crucial’s website for P310 downloads you’ll be greeted with a wide array of information including written and video-based guides. This is a nice touch. At the top is a driver for Crucial and Micron NVMe SSDs, although this is unnecessary — the stock Windows driver is fine. Crucial also offers its Crucial Storage Executive, which is an SSD toolbox with all the typical features you’d expect: drive health information, the ability to perform drives wipes and firmware updates, and more.

Also available is Acronis True Image for Crucial, which will assist you in migrating data to a new drive with backup and imaging functionality. The full suite does help Crucial stand apart from much of the competition, aside from perhaps Samsung, although expert users will likely have their own solutions. Our drive also came with one month of the all apps plan for Adobe Creative Cloud, which doesn’t mean much aside from the fact Crucial is targeting this drive at a range of users — Adobe likely paid to offer that preview deal would be our guess.

Crucial P310: A Closer Look

Image 1 of 4

The 2TB P310 is single-sided and, quite frankly, bereft of anything interesting. That’s a good thing as less is more when it comes to SSDs. Since we’ve already reviewed it in a smaller form factor where it's single-sided with just one NAND package, that’s all we would expect here. We also know the design is DRAM-less, so there should only be a controller and no DRAM.

Image 1 of 2

With everything revealed, we find that we are correct. This is the same package found on the 2TB M.2 2230 version of the drive, although it's oriented differently and further away from the controller. This makes use of the extra space to potentially improve thermals by spreading out the components a little. It’s still using sixteen 232-Layer QLC flash dies in a single package.

One possible observation here is that, if the hardware is the same, you’d expect the 2230 and 2280 versions of the drives to have the same price. In fact, the M.2 2230 market segment has less competition especially at 2TB, so Crucial can make the P310 more expensive. That makes sense, and it means that buying the 2230 version to extend it isn’t necessarily a good proposition outside of maybe for a 2242 device.

Conversely, you might think you can buy the 2280 version for less money and cut it down — a real practice that many people have engaged in for other drives. However, Crucial’s placement of the NAND flash package on the 2280 version is such that this is impossible. That might be another reason they put more space between it and the controller.

Interestingly, the P310 2230 2TB drive actually costs $139.99 right now, $5 less than the 2280 model. The price on that drive was slashed by $40 on November 21, just in time for the Black Friday leadup. So, at this particular snapshot in time, the smaller model could be a viable option. Just be sure to check the latest prices before buying, as they tend to fluctuate quite a bit.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck