Solved Crucial P5 Plus Gen4 NVMe drive

[ian50]

Crucial P5 Plus Gen4 NVMe drives are filtering onto the open markets now, out of beta testing. Advertised capacities range from 500Gb to 1Tb - 2Tb.

Advertised read/write speeds are up to 6600Mb/s with the Momentum Cache operative. I don't doubt that as my P5 Gen3 regularly achieves 3800+Mb/s, with Win7 SP1 as the O/S.

Pricepoint on the P5 Plus 1Tb capacity is just under USD $200. Reasonable, I think. And to pique my interest, the Crucial website maintains that their Gen4 drives will operate as advertised in HP 250's i7/i5/i3.

BUT: does anyone have experience of these drives in a laptop without a heat sink ? They have what Crucial describe as "thermal management", which means as they heat up, the operating speed is deliberately throttled back. With the P5 Plus Gen4, does this become self-defeating ?

 

[Megahertz07]

Does the HP 250 G7 has Gen 4 PCIe?
I heard that only AMD's had gen 4. But that was some time ago.

 

[ian50]

According to HP, the HP 250 i5-8265U model will run with a P5 Plus Gen4 NVMe card installed as the main internal drive. However, HP were cagey about extracting the full speed of a Gen4 in that PC. I took this to mean that it likely won't run much better than a Gen3 - ie. the Gen4 P5 Plus will just run as a Gen3 compatible.

In any case, I've now read several hard reviews of the P5 Plus, all of which reported that the P5 Plus performance is patchy, going briefly offline rather than only throttling back. Other Gen4 NVMe's (for example,Samsung 980) perform much better but cost over twice the current P5 Plus price.

So overall, NO, the P5 Plus is not for me. It's an interesting thought, but it seems Micron (Crucial) may have decided on a lower pricepoint market at the expense of reliability.

 

[Megahertz07]

I'm not a gamer, and I use the computer for daily use.

From my experience, a fast M.2 drive can hardly be noticed on daily use.
When I went from a HDD to a 2.5" SSD, boot times dropped from 3 minutes to 30 seconds, six times faster. It was a huge improvement.
When I went from a 2.5" SSD to a M.2, (3 times faster) I only noticed the difference on a benchmark test. It still boots in 30 seconds.

 

[ian50]

Yeah, that's pretty well my trajectory too.

I'm using a Crucial P5 1Tb Gen3 M2 now (not the P5 Plus, of course). The Crucial Momentum Cache is on.

Just tested it's performance from a dead cold start to try for maximum gain. CrystalDisk Bench recorded 6170 Mb/s on Read and 7198 Mb/s on write. That'll just have to do, I suppose

Anyway, the P5 Plus Gen4 looked like an interesting advance but appears to be not as exciting as first glance might indicate.

 

[SIW2]

I'm not a gamer, and I use the computer for daily use.

From my experience, a fast M.2 drive can hardly be noticed on daily use.
When I went from a HDD to a 2.5" SSD, boot times dropped from 3 minutes to 30 seconds, six times faster. It was a huge improvement.
When I went from a 2.5" SSD to a M.2, (3 times faster) I only noticed the difference on a benchmark test. It still boots in 30 seconds.

According to glary utilities, I am getting 11 seconds boot time for win7 with an old Crucial mx300 sata ssd :huh:. Got almost nothing in startup, which helps.



That doesnt include POST obviously, which I have tried to time manually at 7-8 seconds from power on to the windows boot menu.

 

[Yair]

However, HP were cagey about extracting the full speed of a Gen4 in that PC. I took this to mean that it likely won't run much better than a Gen3 - ie. the Gen4 P5 Plus will just run as a Gen3 compatible.

Sequential/maximum speeds would be limited in a PCIe Gen3 slot, but random performance might not be seriously impacted from what I heard.

When I went from a 2.5" SSD to a M.2, (3 times faster) I only noticed the difference on a benchmark test. It still boots in 30 seconds.

2.5'' and M.2 are just form factors. Presumably you went from a SATA SSD to an NVMe one, but there are 2.5'' NVMe drives and M.2 SATA drives out there too. EDIT: Oh, I see that it's a PCIe AHCI drive, not NVMe(which also connects through PCIe unlike SATA)? I don't know how those compare to the others.

 

[ian50]

Meant to add before in relation to Megahertz' point on what Intel hardware the Gen4 NVMe's will run:

Intel i7-gen11 is the lowest possible spec (Ryzen too of course, latest chip)

That's according to HP here, when I finally wheedled a firm response out of them. Gen4 NVMe's will run on lesser machines - gens 7,8,10 if they have the M2 socket - but only at Gen3 performance.