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Perhaps one of the most annoying things to me is when technology moves up a step but nobody is really ready for it. Take the step from PCIe 4.0 to PCIe 5.0 for instance. After all, who wouldn’t benefit from data transfer jumping from 7GB/s to 14GB/s right? And it is not like there isn’t any warning well ahead of the release. But try and find a laptop anywhere! I just experienced this first hand when my trusty HP Spectre Ultra of so many years just bit the dust. Oh ya… plenty of Ultra 7/9 laptops around but each and every one of them with ‘the old’ Gen 4 SSD M.2 slots. In a specific Ultra design, there is one…only one laptop release that accomodates PCIE 5.0 SSDs to date; the Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1. What’s up with that? Heat right!
Let me start this by saying… “Lenovo if you want me to sell a ton of your Carbon X1’s send me one as a Test Bench! Media professionals would stand in line but they just don’t know”. The reality is that once a new interface is released, especially with SSD storage because of its small size of which some laptops are typically sporting 2230 SSDs just a bit larger than a SD card, manufacturers have to tackle the heat. This heat is created in controller and NAND chips that continually get smaller and smaller, yet move data faster and faster. So now… I have what may be the absolutely PERFECT laptop Gen5 SSD in hand, yet no Gen5 laptop system to test it! Introducing the Crucial P510 Gen5 SSD…
I have the Crucial P510 running in our Test Bench right now, without any heatsink or cooler whatsoever. Although we might always prefer to have that cooling option, this SSD is not setting off any alarms and not ‘red lighting’ it in Crystal DiskInfo. This is because the Crucial P510 uses somewhere in the area of 25% less power than that of other Crucial (and similar brand) Gen5 SSDs such as the Crucial T705… a long time favorite but rather toasty SSD. Yes, that PCIe 5.0 Crucial T705 Gen 5 SSD that we tested more than a year ago will get you full 14GB/s speeds, but you are not getting that into an Ultrabook anywhere. I am pretty confident though that this Crucial P510 at 10GB/s speeds will fit in rather well in just about any Gen5 Ultrabook though…once they are released. Which returns me to the point of my frustration. No Gen 5 Test Ultrabook…
The Crucial P510 is a PCIe 5.0 x4 (4-lane) form factor 2280 (22mm wide x 80mm long) SSD that uses the latest NVMe 2.0 SSD storage protocol. It is available in one and two terabyte capacities, lists read and write speeds write on the box at up to 10GB/s, and we can validate that it is capable of somewhere in the area of 1.5 million read and write IOPS as well.
It is a single-sided SSD which is rather necessary in order to maintain such a cool platform, and we can credit much of this to the latest and greatest Phison PS5031-E31T Gen5 DRAM-less NVME SSD controller. There is no DRAM chip on this SSD and it relies on the host system for an effective high speed cache. Something we also find on this SSD, a first for this combination I believe, are two pieces of Micron’s latest 276-layer 3D TLC ‘G9’ NAND flash memory.
The Crucial P510 Gen 5 SSD come with a 5-year warranty along with a rating of 600TBW for every 1GB capacity, and has an MSRP of $119.99 (1TB) and $199.99 (2TB) which is pretty decent considering what you are getting by way of speed for that price. Check Amazon for availability and pricing.
Also available absolutely free from Crucial is it’s Storage Executive SSD software for observation, maintenance and fine tuning of any Crucial SSD. Here it is showing off those low temps of the Crucial P510:
Now…let’s get to some metrics.