Oh, Crucial, how I miss thee. Honestly, as SSD manufacturers come and go, it was up there as one of the big dogs of NAND flash. The P310 and P510 in particular, I had extensive time with here at PC Gamer. I’ve reviewed them both and built with them in a multitude of systems across the site, and they’re top-quality drives, delivering some solid performance across the PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 connection standards.
Crucial’s P310 1TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD is an absolute trooper of a drive, particularly if you’re after an affordable secondary storage solution for your games. It’s not great on writes or write performance, but for constantly game loading, that’s not something you need to worry about and Amazon has it a remarkably low $143.64. All yours, but shipping from Germany, so expect a week on the shipping.
Key Specs: 1TB | M.2 2280 | Up to 7.1 GB/s read | Up to 6 GB/s write | DRAM-less View Deal
Crucial’s secret budget PCIe 5.0 SSD absolutely dominates in terms of affordable modern storage. If you’re looking for a drive that’s perfect for your OS, without taking out a small bank loan. This is it, with 276-layer TLC NAND, and delivering some impressive 11 GB/s read and 9.4 GB/s write speeds, it absolutely rips along for a drive at this price.
Key Specs: 1TB | M.2 2280 | Up to 11 GB/s read | Up to 9.4 GB/s write | DRAM-less View Deal
The good news is that the two of them are currently on sale this Amazon Prime Day as well. You can nab the 1TB Crucial P310 PCIe 4.0 SSD for about $143, down from $176. And the 1 TB Crucial P510 PCIe 5.0 SSD is a “meagre” $164 down from $179.
If 1TB just ain’t enough to satisfy your gaming storage desires, Newegg’s also running a fairly lucrative deal on the P310 2TB model as well, bringing the price down to “just” $274.99 thanks to a small saving and a $10 off promo code (FTTF6425).
But there’s a catch: they ship from Amazon Germany. Why? Good question, can’t answer that, but if you pick one up today as a Prime Member, they’ll land on your doorstep, state-side, next week. Nice. As far as we can tell, fees don’t look too bad at all (if any from our research), but it could be a possibility, so do just bear that in mind.
Oh, it’s depressing, isn’t it? We need SSDs still to build systems, and yet, the pricing of them is just obscene right now. Even these “deals” that I’ve marked up above here are staggeringly expensive compared to when I first looked at them.
When I initially reviewed the 1TB Crucial P510 on launch, it was $100. One hundred bucks for a PCIe 5.0 drive, ripping along at almost 11 GB/s on sequential read, and 9 GB/s on the write. That’s $0.10 cents per GB at its lowest efficiency. Under review, the P310 was even cheaper, and yes, it was slightly more limited on the sequentials, but its 1 TB equiv ran at just $80 ($0.08 cents).
(Image credit: Future)
Collectively, even discounted , those drives have increased in price by 63.94% and 79.55%, respectively. Yowzer. And yet, relatively good deals. Annoyingly so. Perhaps we had it too good for too long?
The quick low down then? The P510, an ideal main OS drive. PCIe 5.0 SSD, backed up by one of Phison’s E31T DRAMless controllers, and Micron’s own 276-layer TLC NAND flash. It’s got a 600 TBW endurance rating, and is genuinely quite impressive in terms of random 4K read and writes, clocking in 84 and 316 MB/s respectively. It’s markedly cool for a 5.0 SSD as well, tapping out at 64 degrees under intense load.
We’re curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here
The P310, on the other hand, is more of a working man’s PCIe 4.0 SSD, but surprisingly not that far off the mark of the P510 in any measure. Initially launched as a small form factor M.2-2230 drive, ideal for Steam Deck’s and the like, Crucial relaunched it a few months later as a full-length cousin, complete with much better thermals at the cost of slightly slower controller performance. The temp dropped from 68 to 50 degrees under load, but sequential writes fell from 6,314 MB/s to just 6,035 MB/s, although the reads stayed fairly robust at 7,109 MB/s. Random 4K performance was a bit low, with even the write falling under the 300 MB/s mark, but its load time in game seriously clapped at 7.305 seconds total for Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbrings.
On the hardware front, in a similar vein to the P510, it was a DRAMless Phison E27T controller, welded together with a stack of Micron 232-layer QLC NAND flash, with a far lower (thanks to that QLC) 220 TBW at the 1 TB mark. Ideal for regular reads, or a secondary games drive, but less helpful long term for main system storage.
Still, both of them are impressive enough, particularly given the price in the modern era. Best SSD of 2026? Perhaps not, but well, you can thank Germany for the availability and the price point. Auf Wiedersehen, meine Freunde.
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