Crucial P2 NMVe SSD review: Inexpensive, but a slow performer

The Crucial P2 is a budget NVMe SSD that delivers good everyday performance—in other words, it runs the operating system, loads apps, and performs small tasks just fine. Alas, it isn’t particularly swift when transferring larger amounts of data, and that’s being kind. Regardless, at the time of this writing, the P2 is easily one of the more affordable drives on the market. 

This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best SSDs. Go there for information on competing drives and how we tested them. 

Design and features

The P2 is an M.2 2280 (22 mm wide, 80 mm long) stick of chewing gum. The NAND is 96-layer TLC ( Triple-Level Cell/3-bit), and the controller is a Phison PS5013. There’s no DRAM cache, but a certain amount of TLC is dynamically allocated as SLC to improve performance. It works, but it proved slight erratic in testing.

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