The basis of the P2 series from the American manufacturer Crucial are unusual M.2 SSDs. Due to smart pricing, they do not compete with other fast NVMe drives, but rather with slower and bulkier models with a SATA bus connection, which are significantly behind in speed. While a typical SATA SSD is limited to 550 to 560 Mbps round trip, the Crucial P2 drives boast rated speeds of up to 940 Mbps for writes and 2300 Mbps for linear read operations.


There is no full-fledged DRAM chip for caching here, but there is an official 5-year warranty and energy-efficient controllers that heat up slightly under load. Due to this, representatives of this series are good candidates for installation in a laptop or miniature computer case.

When buying, we recommend paying attention to the type of memory used. In the summer of 2021, the manufacturer began releasing P2 drives with QLC memory without any announcements. Unlike the popular TLC memory format, QLC is characterized by lower endurance, much lower speed performance, but at the same time it is more capacious and cheaper to manufacture.

Thanks to the use of TLC memory, a 50 GB archive is written to a regular P2 drive at a speed of 940 to 428 MB / s (note: depends on the fullness of the cache). For comparison, in the new revision, the actual write speed rarely exceeds 200 MB / s. Well, when the SLC cache is full, the write speed drops to 40 – 50 MB / s, and this is even slower than a regular hard drive. Therefore, be careful, QLC-based models contain the prefix “UK CA” in the name.