The Crucial P1 1TB SSD Review: The Other Consumer QLC SSD
by Billy Tallis on November 8, 2018 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The average data rate from the Crucial P1 on The Destroyer is comparable to other entry-level NVMe drives like the Phison E8-based Kingston A1000 and the Intel 660p. The P1 also roughly matches the average data rate of the Crucial MX500 SATA SSD, while several high-end NVMe drives deliver more than twice the performance.
While the average data rate from the Crucial P1 may have been similar to the MX500, the average latency is about twice that of the MX500, and slightly higher than the Intel 660p. The situation is better for the 99th percentile latency, where the Crucial P1 comes close to the MX500 and shows half the 99th percentile latency of the Intel 660p.
The average read and write latencies for the Crucial P1 on The Destroyer are both slightly worse than what the Intel 660p provides, and the Crucial MX500 provides a much better average write latency.
The 99th percentile read latency from the Crucial P1 is very good, competitive with several high-end NVMe SSDs. However, the 99th percentile write latency is quite poor compared to almost any other NVMe SSD or mainstream SATA SSD. This is a huge difference in behavior compared to the Intel 660p. The Crucial P1 is optimized much more for reliable read latency, at significant cost to worst-case write latency under heavy workloads.
The Crucial P1 requires significantly more energy to complete The Destroyer than the Intel 660p, despite the near-identical hardware and very similar overall performance numbers. The Crucial P1's relatively poor efficiency on this test isn't a serious issue given that the drive is intended for less demanding use cases, but combined with the high 99th percentile write latency this points to the P1 possibly experiencing higher write amplification on The Destroyer than the Intel 660p experiences.
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Billy Tallis - Thursday, November 8, 2018 - link
I think you were looking at the price for the 1TB 970 EVO. The 1TB 970 PRO is currently $392.99 on Amazon, closer to twice the price of the Crucial P1. I think it is occasionally reasonable to get something like the 970 EVO for a high-end system. Going past that to a 970 PRO isn't reasonable.PeachNCream - Thursday, November 8, 2018 - link
Whoops, you're correct! Please accept my apologies for that one.DigitalFreak - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
Even then, the 970 EVO wipes the floor with the P1.Death666Angel - Thursday, November 8, 2018 - link
Who wants QLC NVME drives as the first widely available consumer QLC tech? Not me I tell you! :DI am fine with 3D TLC for my performance needs both from a performance and price point at the moment. 500GB is enough for many casual enthusiasts and 1TB isn't too expensive either. I'd really like 2.5" SATA and M.2 SATA QLC for my casual media storage needs.
Lolimaster - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
QLC is such useless product except for manufactures, they give you a WORST product for basically the same price or more than a TLC.MX500/860 EVO 1TB for $160-180.
Lolimaster - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
*Edit 155-160.piroroadkill - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
QLC doesn't seem to make any sense in an M.2 PCIe NVMe format - it's just really slow compared to even a good SATA 6Gbps SSD. QLC seems to make sense in a 2.5" SATA format, with an enormous capacity. 1TB makes no sense for this shitty performance level. It needs to be there to replace larger drives. Actually, even that makes no sense for a home user - where long term retention is more important, and a hard disk is therefore more useful. QLC drives will probably come into their own at the ~4TB mark in Enterprise storage arrays as a mid-tier storage solution, with hard disks under, and MLC NAND above.crotach - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
Oh dearThe_Assimilator - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
Why the bloody bejesus do these manufacturers keep tying ever-slower NAND to ever-faster interfaces? If you want your bloody QLC NAND to be a success, Crucial, make a 2TB+ SATA SSD that costs less per gigabyte than any other SSD on the market, and watch them fly off the shelves. You already got this right with the Micron 1100 series that uses 3D TLC NAND, why can't you do it for QLC?The_Assimilator - Friday, November 9, 2018 - link
Ah, I see that Micron is touting their "5210 ION" series SSDs (using 3D QLC NAND) as "hard drive replacements", and they start at 2TB. Write speeds are not great, but I don't care and I doubt most consumers looking for high-capacity SSDs will either. Hopefully there will be stock of these in time for Black Friday!