Packaging

The Drive

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


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Crucial P5 Plus connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, two flash chips, and one DRAM chip.

Chip Component Analysis

The eight-channel flash controller is a completely new model that seems to be an in-house design by Micron, possibly a result of their acquisition of Tidal Systems in 2015. Unlike the DM01B2, the DM02A1 includes support for PCI-Express 4.0. 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 Plus, we know it supports pseudo SLC caching and TLC, and has eight channels.


The two flash chips are 176-layer 3D TLC NAND made by Micron.


A Micron LPDDR4-4266 chip provides 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.