So it’s a good price - but why is it worth getting? Well, the P2 falls into a very useful category of NVMe SSDs, which pair the super-fast NVMe standard with relatively mundane flash memory. It’s not as fast as the best PCIe 4.0 or even 3.0 drives, thanks to its lack of a DRAM cache and the use of QLC flash memory over faster TLC NAND - but that means it’s sold at quite a reasonable price. And the NVMe interface means it’s considerably faster than your bog-standard 2.5-inch SATA SSD. Those max out at around 550MB/s, making the 2400MB/s sequential read speeds that the Crucial P2 is capable of around four to five times faster. That’s a difference you’ll definitely notice when copying large files around, and it’s matched by competitive random read and write speeds too. In Katharine’s review of the Crucial P2 from earlier this year, she reported loading times “up there with the best” of other drives, offering comparable gaming performance to much more expensive options. She also noted that the P2 was “definitely a better buy than rival SATA SSDs”, and that was before this bonkers discount.
