Crucial P3 Plus 500GB PCIe Gen4 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD, up to 5000MB/s – CT500P3PSSD8

I bought two of these, one 2TB and one 4TB.My old computer was starting to act up and when I got to thinking about it, I built it 8-10 years ago and using an SSD for the internal system drive. As I was researching building a new computer I was totally unaware of these NVMe’s. Basically they look just like a stick of chewing gum. The motherboard I bought, as most now do too, had 3 slots for these with an added PCIe expansion card to accept 2 more. (not saying all boards have this many slots, just that this is the new technology)Anyway, I did a lot of research on these. They are SOOOOO much faster than the old SSD’s and especially the old platter drives spinning at 5400 and even 7200RPM. There really is NO comparison. This is the way to go.My only complaint is that they don’t make these big enough for me so I still have a 10TB platter drive for data storage. I do a lot of video and photos so need this kind of room. If you just use one of these for your system drive (Master) and either an SSD or platter for your data, it’s still a huge improvement but do know that when you go to access your platter drive, if it has stopped spinning, will take a bit to spin up and come on line, so that is going to be your bottle neck for speed.Now for the stuff you are probably wondering about. When looking at these drives, and comparing, look at the access speeds on these. You can get cheaper NVMe’s but note the access speeds. I went with the P3+ because it’s access speed is 5000. There are faster ones available too but I thought for the speed this P3+ (make sure it’s the + version) has, the price was very reasonable.The bad, I was unaware, after buying these, that these DO wear out. I know platter drives do but that is a physical thing. These drives were out because of the technology used to write, erase and rewrite. I forget the name of it off hand but basically the memory on these wear out after so many writes/erases etc. Now granted, it’s in terabytes and for some will last for years and maybe decades. Maybe even for me too, But I only bring this up because as I started looking into this, If you spare the extra money, I highly recommend going with the Crucial P5+. It’s rating for life cycle is over 10Xs more than the P3+. The only thing about the P5+ however is that the largest size it currently comes in is 2TB. I did buy one of those too and I should have used that one as my system master drive. but I’m sure that the P3+ will be fine. I have a tendency to go full bore on just about everything I do. But because the P5+ TBW rating is so much higher, I marked this down on the durability portion.One other piece of advice I would give. If you’re not in a hurry, continually keep checking on the price. I’ve seen the price going up and down on a daily basis. sometimes by as much as 75 dollars or more. So if your patient you can pick these up at a much better price if you just consistently keep checking.

There are something like 10,000 reviews on this Crucial P3 Plus 4TB PCIe Gen4 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD, so I doubt I have too much to add. After reviewing a seemingly innumerable number of reviews on this m.2 and other drives, it seemed that this was the best value for the money.My desktop has a number of older (like 10 years old) platter hard drives and I wanted to surplus them and increase speed at the same time. This device boasts 4tb of data and will handle my primary needs, allowing the HDD drives to act as backups. I didn’t make this drive the boot drive as I intended it for storage, but I am reconsidering that (although the boot drive is a Samsung EVO SSD). Not sure which I’ll do.Overall, after a couple of months, I’m very happy with this drive. The Black Friday sale of less than $200 out the door was a bonus.

Fairly new purchase for my new pc, but SHEESH, it is fast. Get it.

Update as of February 2 – It turns out the drive is not faulty. I tried a 990 pro 4tb in the same nvme slot of my pc and it did the same thing. Thinking its not the drive, i pit this crucial into an enclosure and amazingly, the affected files from the same 1. Something write all copied over to this drive successfully. It turns out the problem with my Asus pn53 is that it seems to have a limit on the drive size. So for now, i have a 4tb in my main slot, the old 2tb 3.0 in the affected second slot, and my 4tb sata in the 2.5 slot. I’m keeping this drive. Due to the update, I upgraded the review to 5 stars.Old review:This is the second P3 4TB drive I bought. first one is in my laptop and is fine. When I bought this, I installed it in my second nvme slot of my desktop to replace the 2TB drive in there. As I started copying the data from my 2TB in an Asus enclosure to this drive, it stopped at some point and sat at 0kbps for hours. I hard rebooted and when I retried, it got to a file and said 0x800701B1: a device which does not exist was specified.I thought maybe it was the WD Blue nvme 2TB not working while in an enclosure. I reformatted the P3 4TB and tried the same data transfer, but from my NAS through my local network. It didnt finish and my PC Blue screened. I tried again and same error with files.I then retried the files from the same NAS to my main drive, and it copied with no issue. This rules out my 2TB drive and the enclosure as being the issue. I doubt the second slot NVME would be the problem as my 2TB worked fine in that slot.This leaves me to believe the Crucial 4TB drive I got is defective even if crystal disk reads it as healthy. I doubt its my OS or the desktop as this would have happened with the main drive too.Please dont avoid this completely just because of the experience i had with this drive. Again, my first one didnt have this issue. When getting this, make sure you dont use your only copy of data and make a backup before trying. If it copies 1TB+ of data successfully, you should be fine.Its normal for a drive like this to slow down from 900mbps to 20-100mbps because of its lack of DRAM. What is not normal is for it to stay stuck at 0mbps for hours and get an error like that when copying files to it.

I upgraded from a 7200rpm “gaming” HDD. Game downloads are a fraction of what they were before. Load times went from 20-30 seconds to 2-3 seconds. The amount of performance and storage space is a GREAT deal for the price. Gen4 speeds for Gen3 prices. Planning to buy more for both my nephews’ pc builds.