Crucial's P510 SSD Taps Phison's Mainstream PCIe 5 Controller For Affordable Storage
Solid state drive (SSD) storage in general has never been more affordable, though there's always room for improvement. That's especially true as drive makers shift gears into PCI Express 5.0 territory—this is where we see the biggest premiums. Perhaps not for long. Case in point, Micron announced a new P510 SSD model under its Crucial brand, which features a mainstream controller.
More precisely, the P510 is powered by Phison's E31T. We previewed the E31T a few months ago, which Phison bills as the "world's first DRAM-less PCIe Gen5 SSD controller IC solution that pushes for true PCIe Gen5 bandwidth." So there's your caveat on the affordable angle—it attempts to get there by eschewing DRAM for a cheaper price.
It's still fast, though. In this case, Micron is touting sequential read and write speeds of up to 11,000MB/s and 9,550MB/s, respectively. Those figures are short of the theoretical maximum bandwidth of 15.75GB/s for PCIe 5.0 SSDs, but the speeds still blows way past the theoretical maximum bandwidth of 7.88GB/s for PCIe 4.0 SSDs. We say "theoretical maximum" because overhead and other factors prevent storage from fully saturating the PCIe bus.
Micron's stated goal with the P510 is to bring "blazing fast Gen5 performance to the masses." Micron's also touting power efficiency, claiming that the P510 consumes 25% less power than previous Crucial Gen5 SSDs. The potential benefit there is longer battery life in laptops, which Micron points out, though realistically SSDs are not a huge drain on batteries. Still, we'll take it.
"The SSD is offered in 1 terabyte (TB) and 2TB capacity options, with an integrated heatsink. The P510 also offers a single-sided design which is easy to install—even in newer Gen5 enabled laptops," Micron states.
There's no mention of actual pricing, so we'll have to wait and see exactly how affordable the P510 ends up being. That will be easier to do if it's offered as a standalone purchase. Inevitably, we anticipate that system builders will adopt the drive for prebuilt desktops and laptops.
In addition the P510, Micron is teasing a bunch of new memory modules, and also a heatsink variant of the P310 SSD. Micron says the heatsink is designed to be compatible with the PlayStation 5.
