The Crucial P3 Plus ($59.99 for 500GB; $189.99 for 2TB as tested) is Micron's economical PCI Express 4.0 alternative to the Crucial P5 Plus. While the Editors' Choice award-winning P5 Plus has a higher rated speed and did considerably better in many of our performance benchmarks, the P3 Plus is a workaday internal solid-state drive with a much lower cost per gigabyte. The P3 Plus is also available in a 4TB model, while the P5 Plus maxes out at 2TB. It's a solid pick for budget buyers who won't be writing terabytes of data every week, mostly standing out on cost.

QLC Memory: High Capacity, Low Write-Durability

The Crucial P3 Plus SSD uses the NVMe 1.4 protocol over a four-lane PCI Express 4.0 bus. Like virtually all recent internal drives, it's in the M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) "gumstick" format. The device pairs homegrown Micron 176-layer QLC 3D NAND flash with a Phison PS5021-E21T controller. (Can't make sense of these terms? Be sure to check out our SSD dejargonizer.)

Like its Crucial P3 sibling—as well as several other recently reviewed drives including the HP FX900, the WD Black SN770, and the Editors' Choice-winning ADATA XPG Atom 50—the P3 Plus uses a controller with no DRAM cache, enlisting instead your PC's main memory as a host memory buffer (HMB). This helps keep the SSD's price low. Micron notes that both Windows 10 and 11 provide native HMB support.

With a rated read speed of up to 5,000MBps, the P3 Plus is at the low end of recent PCI Express 4.0 NVMe drives in terms of raw speed. It's available in capacities ranging from 500GB to 4TB. QLC-based drives tend to support high capacities (up to 4TB or even 8TB), with many recent drives using TLC NAND flash—including the Crucial P5 Plus, the HP FX900, the Acer Predator GM7000, and the ADATA XPG Gammix S70 Blade—maxing out at 2TB.

Another characteristic that the P3 Plus shares with other QLC drives is a relatively low durability rating as measured in terabytes written (TBW)—a manufacturer's estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. Its ratings are similar to those of the Teamgroup Z44Q, the Sabrent Rocket Q4, and the Mushkin Delta. Those QLC-based drives are each rated at 400TBW for 2TB and 800TBW for 4TB.

Most drives with TLC NAND flash boast durability ratings of about 600TBW for 1TB and 1,200TBW for 2TB, while some TLC devices have even higher durability, including the MSI Spatium M470 (3,300TBW for 2TB) and the Corsair Force Series MP600 and the Silicon Power US70, each rated at 1,800TBW for 1TB and 3,600TBW for 2TB.

Micron warrants the Crucial P3 Plus for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in writes, whichever comes first. The company's software includes the free, downloadable Crucial Storage Executive utility, which checks drive status and health and enables firmware upgrades. Also downloadable is Acronis True Image for Crucial, cloning software that works with compatible Crucial SSDs. One competitive feature the P3 Plus lacks is 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption.

Testing the Crucial P3 Plus: Typical Speeds for a Workaday PCIe 4.0 SSD

We test PCI Express 4.0 internal SSDs using a desktop testbed with an MSI X570 motherboard and AMD Ryzen CPU, 16GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4 memory clocked to 3,600MHz, and a discrete GeForce RTX graphics card. We put the P3 Plus through our usual suite of solid-state drive benchmarks comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, and 3DMark Storage. Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files.

For comparison drives, we chose other PCIe 4.0 SSDs with rated sequential read speeds between 5,000MBps and 6,500MBps. (Some earlier PCIe 4.0 drives had lower rated speeds, but we had tested them with a previous version of PCMark giving results incompatible with PCMark 10.) We also included test results for the PCI Express 3.0-based Crucial P3, using our Intel-based PCIe 3.0 testbed.

Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests are a good check of the accuracy of a manufacturer's claimed speeds, and Micron's ratings proved on the mark for the Crucial P3 Plus. The drive effectively matched its rated read speed and slightly exceeded its rated write speed. It was the third fastest in the 4K write-speed test, lagging only the WD Black SN770 and, surprisingly, the Crucial P3.

The P3 Plus' overall PCMark 10 score fell in the middle of our test group, beating about half of its PCIe 4.0 competitors as well as its P3 stablemate. The drive's scores in the PCMark 10 trace tests were mostly in the bottom third of our group. Its 3DMark Storage gaming score was better than the Crucial P3's but at the bottom of the PCI Express 4.0 pack.

A PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD With Budget Price and Performance

The Crucial P3 Plus offers PCI Express 4.0 speed in capacities up to 4GB at an affordable budget price. It makes no pretense of being an elite SSD—if it's high performance you seek, Crucial will gladly sell you a P5 Plus—and its test results were near the bottom of the PCIe 4.0 drives we've reviewed. In fact, in many of our PCMark 10 trace tests of general storage tasks the PCIe 3.0-based Crucial P3 did as well as the P3 Plus or nearly so.

If your PC has a motherboard or expansion card that supports PCI Express 4.0, the P3 Plus is a solid if unspectacular choice among moderately priced, general-purpose internal SSDs. Unless strictly for gaining more capacity, we wouldn't upgrade our rigs to add this drive, however, particularly because the PCIe 3.0 Crucial P3 gave it a run for its money in many of our benchmarks.