Crucial P2 Performance On Ubuntu Linux - An Affordable 500GB NVMe SSD

Last month Crucial introduced their P2 NVMe SSD series as their new low-cost successor to their prior P1 series. The Crucial P2 500GB NVMe solid-state drive retails for $60~65 USD which offers good value and yields better performance than their prior low-cost P1 SSDs.

The Crucial P2 employs a Phison controller and Micron QLC NAND chips. The 500GB P2 is advertised as offering up to 20% faster sequential reads than its predecessor but with similar sequential writes.

The Crucial P2 NVMe SSDs are backed by a five-year warranty which isn't bad for a budget drive and we have many Crucial SSDs still operating fine in our labs after years of use.

We picked up one of these Crucial P2 500GB drives (CT500P2SSD8) for a low-end test box due to its affordability while being from a reliable brand. But that's about it for the excitement - the performance isn't anything too exciting, but then again we knew the specs going in so were not expecting any big surprises.

On a test system running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS we ran various benchmarks via the Phoronix Test Suite on the Crucial P2 500GB and various other NVMe SSDs we had readily available. With SSDs not being a primary focus and generally buying all the solid-state drives for testing, this is just a short and quick comparison for those pondering this 500GB budget NVMe SSD.