Crucial P310 2280 Edition 2TB Review

Final Score: 85 out of 100

To us the large, but very happy, pink elephant in the room is not the performance this model has to offer (which is decent). It is not the form-factor change (to bog standard 2280). No, it is very fact that Crucial was willing to release it in the first place. Make no mistake this is a seemingly massive gamble by Crucial.

On the one hand, they are shouting to the world the dirty little secret about 2230 (and 2242… and 2260) form-factor model’s inflated asking price. No one likes paying a ‘tax’ just to make a darn thing work with their oddball device. So being this blatant, this obvious about the standard P310s inflated asking price may indeed hurt sales of said series… which is something that QLC models cannot afford to do when already competing against TLC models. On the other, by “just” extending the PCB, and not increasing the number of NAND ICs, the P310 2280 2TB is now going to be judged by a much harsher standard… as there are tons of sub-ten cents per GB models out there to choose from already.

This seemingly lose-lose gamble is why no one else has stepped up to do what Crucial has just done. As such, the major takeaway from this review is not the P310 series becoming highly flexible. It is how much of a trend-setting, risk-taking, leader of the SSD market that Crucial is. This alone makes the P310 series special, and will always have a special place in storage enthusiasts’ hearts. As such the P310 2280 edition is a resounding success at increasing Crucial’s reputation and brand loyalty in knowledge consumers.

With all that said, and as our gran-pappy was fond of saying “fuzzy feelings don’t fill your pocketbook”. It is all well and fine to occasionally take a hit and do something good just for goodness sake. But, Micron is known for being wayyyyy too conservative to let Crucial get away with that. That is why the massive price cut goes hand in glove with the change in form-factor. Put bluntly this is a model that needs all the weight on the “excellent asking price” side of the triple beam it can get… as the performance is fairly mid for the 2280 marketplace. Crucial really should have taken the time to at the very least swap out the lone NAND IC for two 8Tbit/1TB NAND ICS… or even four 4Tbit/512GB NAND ICs. That would have helped with deeper queue depth performance. They should have also taken the time to swap the QLC out for TLC NAND. Even “last generation” TLC NAND would have helped this drive hang with the big dawgs of the PCIe 4.0 corner of the 2280 marketplace.

They did not.

Thankfully, with such a low asking price the P310 is still a great bargain. It is the P5 Plus replacement we have been waiting for. Sure, it probably will not end up as the OS / “C Drive” in many systems. It will however be hard to beat as a data / “D drive”… and even harder still for those looking for 4TB of capacity but not willing to pay today’s asking prices for 4TB models! As such the fully fleshed-out T500 will put a surprisingly large amount of pressure on their T500 series. Just like the P5 Plus did back in the day when it was first released. So while the P5 Double Plus Good… err the new P310 2280 edition is certainly not perfect when viewed through the 2280 marketplace’s lens, it is still an excellent addition to Crucial’s line-up. We would go as far as saying it nicely plugs the hole in their value-end that up until now they had been struggling to fill. Now if they would only make a P500 2280 with 4 TLC NAND ICs we would be completely happy with Crucial’s product stack. Until that day the P310 2280 is indeed worthy of your time, your consideration, and your hard-earned money. It really can help shave a bit off your build’s total cost and yet provide you with good (“D drive”) to very good (RAID “scratch disk”) performance.