Micron Unveils Speedy Crucial P310 SSDs For Gaming PCs, Just Ignore Those MSRPs
Two months ago, Micron launched one of the fastest M.2 2230 form factor solid state drives (SSDs) specifically for gaming handhelds, the P310 2230, under its Crucial brand. Now it's bringing the Crucial P310 SSD lineup to desktops in full size form (M.2 2280) at attractive price points, so long as you look at street pricing and not the MSRPs currently listed on Crucial's web store.
"Micron’s Crucial P310 2280 SSD delivers blazing fast gaming-level speeds, allowing users to do it all faster—from gaming to booting Windows to running multiple creative apps at the same time—without compromising on quality," said Jonathan Weech, senior director of product marketing for Micron’s Commercial Products Group. "Architected with our advanced 3D NAND technology and optimized to deliver the utmost power efficiency, the 2280 SSD empowers everyone from gamers to creatives to squeeze more out of their battery life when using data-rich apps."
For this series, Micron is pairing Phison's PS5027-E27T controller built on TSMC's 12-nanometer manufacturing process with it's own 232-layer quad-level cell (QLC) 3D NAND flash memory chips. There are three capacities available, including 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. There's no DRAM cache on any of the models, though, which we suppose helps keeps pricing down (more on that in a moment).
As is often the case, bigger capacities net bigger performance figures. In this case, the 500GB model is rated to deliver up to 6,600MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 3,500MB/s of sequential write performance. Meanwhile, both the 1TB and 2TB models bump those rated sequential read and write metrics up to 7,100MB/s and 6,000MB/s, respectively.
While not the fastest-rated PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market, those metrics put the P310 2280 series among the upper echelon. As to the pricing, Crucial's web store is selling the 500GB model for $88.99, the 1TB model for $114.99, and the 2TB model for $189.99, all without a heatsink. Micron says a "version with a heatsink will be released in the coming months and is ideally suited for use with PlayStation 5 and desktop gaming PCs."
