Crucial’s P3 NVMe SSD is down to £105 for a 2TB unit

After a £69 discount (nice), the Crucial P3 has become the most affordable 2TB PCIe 3.0 SSD on Amazon. You’ll now pay just £105 for this drive, a great deal that works out to just 5.3p per gigabyte.

The Crucial P3 has impressive specs that more or less max out the PCIe 3.0 connection, with maximums of around 3500MB/s sequential reads and 3000MB/s sequential writes. Random read and write speeds are also strong, at 650K and 700K IOPS respectively. In terms of metrics like game load times and OS boot times, you should expect excellent results, and that means it’s quite easy to recommend the P3 for most people.

So this all sounds pretty good – so what’s the catch? Well, the Crucial P3 is a QLC drive with no DRAM cache, so while it does impress in terms of capacity per pound, it does suffer from worse sustained performance than TLC drives that do have DRAM caches. To wit, a friend of mine recently picked up this drive for recording video, and it slowed down fairly substantially once the SLC cache was exhausted – we’re talking write speeds of around 100MB/s instead of the 3000MB/s quoted for the max sequential write speeds. You’re not likely to run into this limit when, for example, downloading Linux ISOs or 4K video files, but you might run into it in more strenuous and unabating content creation tasks like my friend discovered above. For that reason, for heavier content creation tasks where you’re going to be writing data continuously, you’re better off with a TLC drive with DRAM, such as the higher-grade Crucial P5 or P5 Plus.

Of course, we also have a good write-up of other recommended drives here in the best SSDs for gaming.

I hope you found this deal useful – be sure to let me know what you think in the comments, and hang loose!