The Crucial P1 1TB SSD Review: The Other Consumer QLC SSD
by Billy Tallis on November 8, 2018 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
When the Heavy test is run on an empty drive, the large SLC cache of the Crucial P1 enables it to deliver an average data rate that is competitive with most high-end NVMe SSDs. When the drive is full and the SLC cache's size is greatly reduced, the performance drops to well below that of a typical mainstream SATA SSD. This behavior is essentially the same as that shown by the Intel 660p.
The empty-drive run of the Heavy test doesn't push the latency of the Crucial P1 up any higher than is typical for high-end NVMe drives. Things get more interesting on the full-drive test run, where the average latency from the P1 increases by a factor of 12 and the 99th percentile latency increases by a factor of 58. The average latency from the P1 is only slightly worse than the Intel 660p, but the 99th percentile score is three times that of the 660p.
The average read latency of the Crucial P1 is significantly affected by whether the test is run on a full or empty drive, but even the worse of the two scores is still clearly better than what the Crucial MX500 manages. On the write side of thing, filling the drive has an almost catastrophic effect on latency, driving the average up by a factor of 17, an even more severe impact than the Intel 660p shows.
The 99th percentile read latency from the Crucial P1 is typical for high-end NVMe SSDs for both the full and empty drive test runs. The high overall 99th percentile latency is due entirely to the write portion, where filling the drive increases 99th percentile write latency by almost two orders of magnitude.
The total energy consumption of the Crucial P1 during the Heavy test is significantly higher than for the Intel 660p, and the difference between the empty and full drive test runs is larger for the P1 than for any other drive.
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Billy Tallis - Thursday, November 8, 2018 - link
I think you were looking at the price for the 1TB 970 EVO. The 1TB 970 PRO is currently $392.99 on Amazon, closer to twice the price of the Crucial P1. I think it is occasionally reasonable to get something like the 970 EVO for a high-end system. Going past that to a 970 PRO isn't reasonable.PeachNCream - Thursday, November 8, 2018 - link
Whoops, you're correct! Please accept my apologies for that one.DigitalFreak - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
Even then, the 970 EVO wipes the floor with the P1.Death666Angel - Thursday, November 8, 2018 - link
Who wants QLC NVME drives as the first widely available consumer QLC tech? Not me I tell you! :DI am fine with 3D TLC for my performance needs both from a performance and price point at the moment. 500GB is enough for many casual enthusiasts and 1TB isn't too expensive either. I'd really like 2.5" SATA and M.2 SATA QLC for my casual media storage needs.
Lolimaster - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
QLC is such useless product except for manufactures, they give you a WORST product for basically the same price or more than a TLC.MX500/860 EVO 1TB for $160-180.
Lolimaster - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
*Edit 155-160.piroroadkill - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
QLC doesn't seem to make any sense in an M.2 PCIe NVMe format - it's just really slow compared to even a good SATA 6Gbps SSD. QLC seems to make sense in a 2.5" SATA format, with an enormous capacity. 1TB makes no sense for this shitty performance level. It needs to be there to replace larger drives. Actually, even that makes no sense for a home user - where long term retention is more important, and a hard disk is therefore more useful. QLC drives will probably come into their own at the ~4TB mark in Enterprise storage arrays as a mid-tier storage solution, with hard disks under, and MLC NAND above.crotach - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
Oh dearThe_Assimilator - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
Why the bloody bejesus do these manufacturers keep tying ever-slower NAND to ever-faster interfaces? If you want your bloody QLC NAND to be a success, Crucial, make a 2TB+ SATA SSD that costs less per gigabyte than any other SSD on the market, and watch them fly off the shelves. You already got this right with the Micron 1100 series that uses 3D TLC NAND, why can't you do it for QLC?The_Assimilator - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
Ah, I see that Micron is touting their "5210 ION" series SSDs (using 3D QLC NAND) as "hard drive replacements", and they start at 2TB. Write speeds are not great, but I don't care and I doubt most consumers looking for high-capacity SSDs will either. Hopefully there will be stock of these in time for Black Friday!