Introduction

Crucial is one of the biggest players in the SSD market because of their ability to use their own NAND chips manufactured by their parent company Micron.



We haven't heard from Crucial for quite a while. The last SSDs they released were the Crucial P1, BX500, and MX500 back in 2018. As part of their M.2 NVMe push, Crucial also announced the Crucial P2 SSD recently—our review is in progress.

The Crucial P5 is the first SSD based on Micron's new in-house controller DM01B2, which is an 8-channel design with DRAM support. Crucial P5 comes in the M.2 form factor, using a fast PCI-Express x4 3.0 NVMe connection to interface with the rest of the system. As expected, the 96-layer TLC NAND flash chips on the Crucial P5 are made by Micron.

The Crucial P5 is available in capacities of 250 GB ($55), 500 GB ($80), 1 TB ($150), and 2 TB ($340). Endurance for these models is set at 150 TBW, 300 TBW, 600 TBW, and 1200 TBW respectively. Crucial includes a five-year warranty.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Crucial P5 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and two flash chips, and a DRAM cache chip is installed, too.

Chip Component Analysis

The eight-channel flash controller is a completely new model that looks to be an in-house design by Micron, possibly a result of their acquisition of Tidal Systems in 2015. Not a lot is known about the controller, and Micron is trying to keep details under wraps. Based on the details of the Crucial P5, we know it supports pseudo SLC caching and TLC, and has eight channels.


The two flash chips each have a capacity of 512 GB. They are 96-layer 3D TLC made by Micron.


A Micron DDR4-4266 chip provides 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.