Micron Crucial P310 2230 M.2 Review: An Excellent Tiny PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD

Micron’s latest PCIe 4 NVMe SSD, the Crucial P310 PCIe Gen4 NVMe 2230 M.2 SSD, first released on July 17, 2024, is a bit different from the previous version, the P3 and P3 Plus that came out two years ago.

Coming in the compact 2230 M.2 form—the drive is only 30mm long as opposed to 80mm of the 2280 traditional design—the new internal drive is less than half the size of most NVMe SSDs, yet are available in 1TB and 2TB capacities.

Update: On September 17, 2024, Micron released the 2280 version of the drive with a new 500GB capacity and a heatsink option.

Here’s the bottom line: If you’re looking for a heatless, compact, and, most importantly, fast, at around 10 cents per gig, the Crucial P310 is an excellent buy for general consumers who don’t write a ton of data daily. Get one today!

Dong’s note: I first published this post on July 17, 2024, as a preview and updated it only on July 31 to an in-depth review after hands-on testing.

Crucial P310: Micron’s fastest PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD

While the P3 and P3 Plus were inferior to Micron’s previous Crucial P5 Plus by design, the Crucial P310 is set to be better. In fact, Micron claims that it’s its fastest PCIe 4.0 drive to date, with copy speeds of up to 7,000MB/s for writing and up to 6,000MB/s for reading, or about 1000MB/s faster than the P5 Plus.

Micron says the new drive has even better random access performance with 1 million IOPS. It’s so fast that the company says it’s a deal for gamers who need to load their games fast. Additionally, the drive is said to use very little power, meaning it’s perfect for battery-operated devices, such as handheld game consoles or notebooks. And the company didn’t lie, as you will note in the performance section below.

The table below shows the differences between these two PCIe 4.0 drives.

Hardware specifications: Crucial P310 vs. Crucial P5 Plus

	Micron Crucial P310	Micron Crucial P5 Plus
Capacities	2230: 1TB, 2TB 2280: 500GB, 1TB, 2TB	512GB, 1TB, 2TB
Interface	PCIe 4.0 x4
Design (release date)	M.2 2230 (07/17/2024) M.2 2280 (9/17/2024)	M.2 2280 (8/3/2021)
Controller	Phison E27T 4-channel DRAM-less controller	Crucial NVMe Architecture
NAND Flash Memory	Micron Advanced 3D NAND
Security	None	Full-drive encryption capable (TCG OPAL 2.0
Sequential Read	1TB, 2TB: 7100 MB/s 500GB: 6600 MB/s	Up to 6600MB/s
Sequential Write	1TB, 2TB: 6000 MB/s 500GB: 3500 MB/s	1TB, 2TB: Up to 5000MB/s 500GB: Up to 4000MB/s
Endurance  (Terabyte Written)	110TB (500GB) 440 TBW (2TB) 220 TBW (1TB)	1200 TBW (2TB) 600 TBW (1TB) 300 TBW (500GB)
Software	Crucial Storage Executive
Heatsink version	Yes (2280 version only)	Yes
Warranty	5 years
US Price (check price on Amazon!)	$50 (500GB) $115 (1TB) $215 (2TB)	$90 to $190 (500GB to 2TB)

Crucial P310: Low endurance rating

As shown in the table above, the new Crucial P310, while faster, is not necessarily all better than the older P5 Plus. For one, it’s a frill-free drive without built-in hardware encryption, though that’s not a huge deal considering its target audience, namely casual users and gamers.

What’s more significant, however, is the fact it has a significantly lower endurance rating. Specifically, it has about a third of endurance compared to the P5 Plus of the same capacity. In other words, at the same daily writing rate, the P310 will run out of life three times faster than its predecessor. Low endurance ratings are never a good thing.

For example, the 1TB P310 is slated to be able to handle a total of 220 TB written to it compared to 600 TB of the P5 Plus. That said, if you write 1TB to the new SSD every day, you’ll get 220 days out of it.

Before you feel alarmed, in real life, we generally write much less than 1TB, not even a fraction of that on a daily basis. Typically, on average, we only manipulate (read and write) just about a few gigabytes of data a day. So, the 1TB P310 can last hundreds of times more than 220 days, and the 2TB version will double that.

A flexible yet familiar Crucial SSD

Other than that, the P310 is slated to be a familiar SSD. It’s the same as most others in the Crucial family. The drive includes a 5-year warranty and comes with the Storage Executive dashboard software for health monitoring, firmware updates, and other user-accessible features, such as Over-provisioning.

It’s also worth noting that while shorter than the 2280 standard SSDs, the P310 can work in any NVMe M.2 slot, albeit a length extender is needed in some instances. On the other hand, a 2280 standard drive can never fit in a 2230 M.2 slot.

Micron Crucial P310 2230: Excellent performance

If you’re still bothered by the Crucial P310’s low endurance rating, its performance will make you feel compensated.

The new drive is one of the fastest PCIe 4.0 on the market. In sequential (copy) tests, it was even speedier than some PCIe 5.0 drives, and it performed consistently even when handling a large amount of data.

The Crucial P310 also did well with random access performance, matching, and even outdoing some high-end PCIe 4.0 drives.

In real-world anecdotal testing, I alternated the new drive and a Crucial T700 on the same computer as boot drives and often didn’t know which drive I was using. For general tasks, the P310 offered the same experience as the much more expensive (and clearly faster) PCIe 5.0 counterpart.

There’s one thing the P310 was better than the P700: It ran cool. The drive felt just a little warm to the touch, even in heavy operating, and it doesn’t require a heatsink, which is generally a requirement for any PCIe 5.0 drive.

Overall, for the cost, the Crcuail P310 is an excellent performer and will make anyone happy.

Conclusion

Compact and fast, Micron’s Crucial P310 PCIe Gen4 NVMe 2230 M.2 SSD is a welcome new option for those wanting an easy NVMe upgrade. While its low endurance rating can be a bit discouraging, if you are a casual user, chances are there’s nothing to worry about, especially if you get the 2TB version. Consider one today!