Products You May Like
The Crucial P5 Plus is one of the most affordable ‘second-gen’ PCIe 4.0 SSDs, offering sequential read speeds up to a storming 6600MB/s while costing less than alternatives like the Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850. As you may have guessed from the title of this post, it’s also on sale at Amazon for a very reasonable price: £59 gets you a 500GB model compared to a UK RRP of £101.
The P5 Plus isn’t listed amongst the best gaming SSDs here on RPS, but I’ve had the pleasure of testing it over on Eurogamer, where it’s listed as one of the best PS5 SSDs. The P5 Plus also excels in a PC, where the strong sequential speeds cut down on file transfer times and make working with 4K video footage easy. In terms of OS and game load times, the random performance is also strong, with a rated random read/write speed of 360K IOPS and 700K IOPS. The WD Black SN850 and Samsung 980 Pro are faster, but you still get a nice performance advantage over PCIe 3.0 SSDs that you might be running in your machine.
To take advantage of this level of horsepower, you’ll need to have a CPU and motherboard (or laptop) that supports the PCIe 4.0 standard. That includes AMD 500-series motherboards (eg B550, X570) and Intel 500-series and 600-series motherboards (eg X590, X690). There are some 400-series motherboards (eg Z490) that also support PCIe 4.0 SSDs with some CPUs installed, so it’s well worth checking if yours is one of the lucky ones.
We’ll have more deals for you prepared next week, but that brings our weekend coverage to a close. Thanks for joining us and we’ll catch you again next time!