Crucial P310 2 TB (2230) NVMe SSD Review – Supercharging Handhelds With Top Gen4 Speeds

While PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs are setting new storage performance benchmarks, the real-life and application benefits of getting those drives are still not worth the price you are paying for them. It's still very much an early adopter product for now and while we appreciate the speed-up, we would love to see the performance transition from synthetic benchmarks to actual use cases.

And you know what's still considered to be quite fast without breaking your wallet? The current-gen PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs. Gen 4 SSDs are now available at very affordable price rates and offer great performance. Furthermore, there's a new emerging market that has taken the gaming market by storm and that's handheld. With the arrival of Steam Deck, there have been multiple new products coming out such as the ASUS ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion, MSI Claw, and various Chinese models just to name a few.

Today, I will be testing the Crucial P310 PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD. This is a high-end SSD that targets the handheld market and we have the 2 TB variant in our hands which retails for $214.99 US right now.

The Crucial P310 is the latest addition to the Crucial SSD portfolio powered by Micron. We have tested loads of Crucial SSDs including their high-end Gen5 and Gen4 products. For the P310, the company offers some big numbers on paper for the handheld and portable PC segments. The Crucial P310 SSDs are based on the NVMe SSD form factor and feature QLC-based 3D NAND flash, offering up to 2 TB of capacity, better performance, and slightly lower power input.

The SSDs are based on the Phison E27t "PS5027" controller which is PCIe 4.0 compliant. The chip is based on TSMC's 12nm process node and features a Single-CPU architecture with a 32-bit microcontroller. Being a cheaper alternative to faster Gen4 drives, the SSD comes without a DRAM cache & only features an onboard HMB (Host Memory Buffer) but does support Phison's 5th Gen LDPEC, ECC & RAID ECC. The controller has a maximum voltage of 1.2V and supports both 3D TLC & QLC NAND with 4 channels and flash rates of up to 3600 MT/s. The SSD also features Micron 232-layer QLC NAND Flash.

As for the performance aspects, the Micron P310 2 TB SSD is rated at 7100 MB/s Read, 6000 MB/s Write, and an endurance of 440 TBW.

The Crucial P310 2 TB SSD comes in a standard package. The package is colored white/blue and it features a picture of the SSD. The front lists the 2 TB capacity and the 5-year warranty. Plus, it also reads that its "handheld compatible" which empahsizes its target market.

The back of the package lists some specifications of the SSD and some performance figures which we will get to in a bit.

The Crucial P310 SSD package includes a manual and the SSD itself which is protected under a clamshell plastic case. There's no heatsink in the package since it can pretty much sustain max load without any thermal bottlenecks like the Gen5 drives.

The front of the SSD has the standard sticker. This is the standard NVMe 1.4 standard & measures 30 x 22 x 2.45mm (LxWxH).

The front of the SSD has a sticker which also features a thin thermal pad underneath it to keep the SSD running cool. Given that most motherboards today come with a pre-installed M.2 heatsink, you can pretty much run the SSD as it is or put it under one of those cooling solutions to ensure better stability.

There is a single NAND Flash chip and the Phison E27T Gen4 controller situated on the front. These NAND Flash chips are the "4FD2D-NY325" spec.

The non-heatsink drive will perfectly fit inside a laptop and Mini PC, where there's not enough room to accommodate a large heatsink.

Our test platform for this review consisted of an Intel Core i9-13900K processor which ran at stock clocks on the MSI Z790 ACE motherboard. The platform was coupled with 32 GB of DDR5 memory from G.Skill (Trident Z5/ 16 GB x 2) and the MSI MEG Ai1300P PSU. For graphics, I used the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM X. This rounds up as a high-end platform for tests with modern-day SSDs.

First up, we have the official performance stats for these drives as listed by their manufacturers. You can compare these stats with the rest of the drives I tested in the following chart:

AS SSD Benchmark download is a Windows 10 utility software program that tests the performance of solid-state drives. With its help, you can find out the speed of all installed SSDs and take care of any issues that the tests may reveal. The free app performs three separate tests to provide you with conclusive evidence of your driver's general behavior while it copies, reads, and writes data.  The app determines the access time of an SSD, along with its speed and performance capabilities

As the industry’s leading provider of high-performance storage & network connectivity products, ATTO has created a widely-accepted Disk Benchmark freeware software to help measure storage system performance. As one of the top tools utilized in the industry, Disk Benchmark identifies performance in hard drives, solid-state drives, RAID arrays as well as the host connection to attached storage. Top drive manufacturers, like Hitachi, build and test every drive using the ATTO Disk Benchmark.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host bus adapters (HBAs), hard drives, and SSD drives, and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software. It measures sequential reads/writes speed, random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed, selects test data (Random, 0Fill, 1Fill),

To test the maximum average transfer speeds of the drives, I used a 100 GB file to test the limits.

The PCMark 10 Storage benchmark is designed to test the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, and a selection of popular games. You can test the system drive or any other recognized storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 10 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices.

There are plenty of M.2 2230 NVMe options out in the market but Crucial is one step ahead with top-notch speeds at up to 7100 MB/s read speeds and in terms of performance, the drive offered some really good numbers despite its DRAM-less design. It's not like there are any DRAM drives available in this form factor but for handhelds with Gen4 capability, you are ensured some solid SSD storage speeds.

The performance can drop quite a bit in large transfers where the drive only delivers around 0.5 GB/s transfer speeds due to its QLC design but those are just a few cases where you'll be heavily moving files around. As a primary drive. and if you are running a Gen4-compliant Mini PC or handheld, then the P310 SSD is very performant. Pairing it up with newer devices such as the ROG Ally X, Legion Go or the MSI Claw makes for a perfect choice. As for pricing, $214.99 US for 2 TB is a tad bit on the higher side but we can expect Crucial to make some adjustments down the road as the company has done with prior DRAM products once supply gets better.

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