Get the Crucial P5 Plus for £99.98 (was £128, RRP £157)
So: let me tell you a little about this Crucial drive. It’s one that I’ve had the pleasure of testing in both the PC and PS5, and in both places it’s delivered rather impressive real world results, on par with other ‘second-gen’ PCIe 4.0 SSDs that cost substantially more - like the Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850, the latter of which being RPS’ choice for the best PCIe 4.0 SSD. It comes with a five-year limited warranty, like those other drives, with a quoted endurance figure of 600 terabytes written. Given these factors, it’s hard not to see the Crucial P5 Plus as the best value PCIe 4.0 SSD on the market. After all, you’re paying just £30 more than you’d pay for a ‘value’ NVMe SSD like the Crucial P2, and you’re getting speeds that are between 2x and 3x as fast. That’s in sequential reads, mind you, and the difference in random reads is smaller. But even still, you’re getting a ton of extra performance for not that much money, especially with today’s discount. When we last covered the P5 Plus, back in October ‘21, we heralded a price cut to £126, and this is an even better deal. Will we see the drive drop to lower prices still? Yes, it seems pretty likely, but this is still a great one-day drop, and therefore it’s a reasonable time to lock in an SSD upgrade. You’ll benefit from a boost to load times now, see a big difference in handling large files like HD video clips, and be well prepared for the DirectStorage feature to arrive on Windows 10 and 11 sometime soon-ish. In fact, the DirectStorage API was released just last month, so hopefully that means the first proper games to support it will arrive sooner rather than later. In terms of requirements, you will need a motherboard that supports PCIe 4.0 to make use of the full speed of this drive - if you plunk it into a PCIe 3.0 slot instead, it’ll still work, but you’ll be operating at about half the speed and you may as well just get a cheaper PCIe 3.0 drive at that point. Most Intel and AMD 500-series and later motherboards support PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0, which includes popular platforms like B550, X570, Z590 and Z690, so you should be good if your motherboard was released since 2019. I hope you find this deal useful, and do let us know in the comments if you’ve got any questions or feedback. Thanks for joining us, and we’ll catch you on the next one!
