The Crucial P1 1TB SSD Review: The Other Consumer QLC SSD

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.

As with the Heavy test, the Crucial P1 handles the Light test as well as most high-end drives when the test is run on an empty drive with plenty of free space in the SLC cache. When the test is run on a full drive, the P1's average data rate drops to just below that of the Crucial MX500 SATA SSD.

When the Light test is run on an empty Crucial P1, the average and 99th percentile latency scores are comparable to high-end NVMe SSDs because the test is operating entirely within the SLC cache. When that cache is shrunk by completely filling the drive, both latency scores are an order of magnitude worse. However, the 99th percentile latency is much better than what we saw from the Intel 660p when full.

The average read latency of the Crucial P1 stays reasonably below that of SATA SSDs even when the test is run on a full drive, but the average write latency ends up several times higher than the MX500 SATA drive. The Intel 660p and DRAMless Toshiba RC100 have similar average write latency when full.

The 99th percentile read and write latency scores tell a similar story to the average latencies, but the weaknesses of the Crucial P1 stand out more clearly. Even with a full drive, read latency on the Light test isn't a problem, but write latency can climb to tens of milliseconds.

Energy usage by the Crucial P1 is reasonably low (by NVMe standards) when the Light test is run on an empty drive. When the test is run on a full drive, the P1 uses substantially more energy than the Intel 660p and instead shows comparable efficiency to most high-performance NVMe SSD.