Practical testing …
First, let’s take a look at our test system, in which the Crucial P310 is allowed to show what it can do. We used an ASRock B660 Steel Legend with Intel Core i7 12700k and 32GB Crucial Ballistix Max 4400 RAM. Windows 10 was used as the operating system this time.
The benchmarks were all carried out with the latest version of AIDA64.
For comparison, we also tested a Samsung 970 Evo with 1TB storage.
As we can clearly see here, the P310 performs well in the read tests. It does not achieve the maximum specified 7100 MB/s read values with a test size of 1 GB, but with almost 5900 MB/s it is not far below this in practice. Incidentally, the Samsung 970 EVO is specified with 3500 MB/s, and cannot quite keep up with the specifications here either.
The P310 is also convincing in the read and write tests of the AS SSD benchmark. All measured values are within the expected tolerance.
In order for the Crucial P310 to exploit its full potential, a PCIe Gen4 x4 interface is required, i.e. an M.2 port which is connected with PCIe 4.0 and at least x4 lanes. ASRock’s current motherboards offer the Hyper M.2 slot with up to 64Gb/s and the very latest motherboards even offer the ASRock Blazing M.2 PCIe Gen5 x4 slot with up to 128Gb/s.
Here is a brief overview of the PCIe standards currently in use:
PCIe 2.0 x1 500 MB/s
PCIe 2.0 x2 1000 MB/s
PCIe 2.0 x4 2000 MB/s
PCIe 2.0 x8 4000 MB/s
PCIe 2.0 x16 8000 MB/s
PCIe 3.0 x1 985 MB/s
PCIe 3.0 x2 1969 MB/s
PCIe 3.0 x4 3938 MB/s
PCIe 3.0 x8 7877 MB/s
PCIe 3.0 x16 15754 MB/s
PCIe 4.0 x1 1969 MB/s
PCIe 4.0 x2 3938 MB/s
PCIe 4.0 x4 7877 MB/s
PCIe 4.0 x8 15754 MB/s
PCIe 4.0 x16 31508 MB/s
PCIe 5.0 x1 3938 MB/s
PCIe 5.0 x2 7877 MB/s
PCIe 5.0 x4 15754 MB/s
PCIe 5.0 x8 31508 MB/s
PCIe 5.0 x16 63016 MB/s
You can check the correct connection using the Crucial Storage Executive solid state drive software or Crystal Disk Info, as mentioned above.
After and during the entire test, we naturally also paid attention to the temperature of the M.2 SSD. This was measured externally with a laser thermometer. As you can see …
| Test | Temperatur |
| Idle | 35°C |
| Lesen | 45°C |
| Schreiben | 47°C |
… the temperatures are perfectly within limits. Under load, the temperature measured externally rises to a good 45°C. This is a good 25°C away from the maximum internal temperature according to the controller specification. Depending on the position in the installed handheld, however, you should take another look at the temperatures.
Now we come to the result and general impression of the Crucial P310 1TB …