Pros Fast throughput speeds, in a big-picture senseCompatible with laptops with PCIe 5.0 M.2 slotsPriced well below other PCIe 5.0 SSDs Cons Not a standout in PCMark 10 and 3DMark Storage testingCapacity maxes out at 2TB Crucial P510 Specs Bus Type PCI Express 5.0 Capacity (Tested) 1 Controller Maker Phison Interface (Computer Side) PCI Express Internal Form Factor M.2 Type-2280 Internal or External Internal NAND Type TLC NVMe Support Rated Maximum Sequential Read 11000 Rated Maximum Sequential Write 9500 Terabytes Written (TBW) Rating 600 Warranty Length 5 All Specs The Crucial P510 ($119.99 for 1TB as tested) is Micron's third PCI Express 5.0 internal SSD, after the Crucial T700 and T705, both PCMag Editors' Choice award winners. Unlike these elite speedsters—the T705 is the fastest consumer SSD we have tested to date, with the T700 in the second tier—the P510 is built for mainstream use. Although it has the throughput speed we'd expect from a Gen 5 drive, it conserves power and runs cooler than its brethren, employing a simple heat spreader rather than the sort of massive finned or fanned heatsink that often ships with a PCIe 5.0 SSD. So it's not surprising that its gaming and general-storage test scores are more in line with what we would expect from a high-performance previous-generation PCIe 4.0 SSD like the steadfast Samsung SSD 990 Pro.Design and Specs: DRAM-Less Gen 5 Joins the ChatWhen PCI Express 5.0 SSDs hit the market in the spring of 2023, they promised unheard-of speeds for an internal SSD, but you needed a boutique desktop PC with the latest components or to build such a system from scratch. Today, Gen 5 SSD support is coming to select high-end laptops, but laptops of any stripe have no room for the massive heatsink hardware most other PCIe 5.0 drives require. So manufacturers have gone to exceptional lengths to beat the heat. The Crucial P510 consumes 25% less power than previous Crucial Gen 5 SSDs to support longer battery life. That efficiency also aims to keep the drive cool enough to minimize thermal throttling.The Crucial P510 is a four-lane solid-state drive running the NVMe 2.0 protocol over a PCIe 5.0 bus. This internal SSD comes in the standard M.2 Type-2280 (80mm-long) "gumstick" format. The drive pairs Micron 276-layer G9 3D TLC NAND with Phison's E31T, a Gen 5-optimized DRAM-less controller designed to minimize heat generation.The all-black P510 has all of its silicon on one side (the top), covered with a thin heat spreader. It can fit easily into laptops and even the PlayStation 5. It lacks—and does not require—the massive heatsinks bundled with many Gen 5 drives or offered as an option. Micron says it will offer a full-fledged heatsink for the P510 later, but unlike with elite PCI Express SSDs, it isn't critical.(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)System Requirements: Going MainstreamPCIe 5.0 SSDs, even mainstream models such as the P510, promise a major throughput speed boost over PCIe 4.0 drives, but you can take full advantage of it only if you have recent hardware that supports the standard. Only the latest boutique desktops and a few recent laptops are likely to be PCIe 5.0-ready off the shelf, so you may have to build your own PC from the ground up or update an existing system to gain the connectivity required. You'll need an Intel 12th Gen or later Core CPU with a motherboard based on Intel's Z690 or Z790 chipset or later; or a Ryzen 7000 or 9000 processor with an AM5 motherboard built around an X670, X670E, or B650E chipset, or later ones.Now, an important point: Just because you have one of those chipsets doesn't guarantee that the motherboard maker actually implemented a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 SSD slot or slots. That's up to the board maker, so check your system's or motherboard's specs and documentation to make sure you actually have such a slot before investing in one of these drives. Some boards have PCIe 5.0 expansion slots for graphics cards and other PCI Express cards, but you need a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 slot, specifically.Price and Storage Capacity: A New Reasonably Priced Gen 5 NicheThe Crucial P510 is available in 1TB and 2TB versions; you can see the list prices for each in the chart below.It is priced lower than other Gen 5 SSDs we have reviewed, and a little above the high-end PCI Express 4 drives we compare it with in the performance section below. The P510's sequential read and write rated speeds are highest at the 1TB level—its throughput speeds are most similar to the first generation of PCI Express 5 SSDs and have since been surpassed by more recent Gen 5 drives such as the Crucial T705 and Corsair MP700 Pro. As for durability, expressed as lifetime write capacity in total terabytes written (TBW), the P510 matches the Crucial T700 and T705 in the capacities they share. Its durability rating is a notch below the Corsair MP700 Pro, the ADATA Legend 970, and the Aorus 10000, which are rated at 700TBW for 1TB and 1,400TBW for 2TB. The Seagate FireCuda 540 is the reigning Gen 5 durability champ, with ratings of 1,000TBW for the 1TB stick and 2,000TBW for 2TB.The terabytes-written spec is a manufacturer's estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. Micron warranties the P510 for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in data writes, whichever comes first. But the drive's durability rating is such that unless you're writing unusually large amounts of data to the SSD, it's a safe bet that the P510 will last the full warranty period and well beyond.Recommended by Our EditorsPerformance Testing: Spot-On Sequential Throughput, But Otherwise Unremarkable In benchmarking the P510, we used our latest testbed PC, designed specifically for benchmarking PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs. It is built around an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard with an AMD X670 chipset, 32GB of DDR5 memory, one PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slot (with lanes that have direct access to the CPU), and three PCIe 4.0 slots. The system sports an AMD Ryzen 9 7900 CPU using an AMD stock cooler; a GeForce RTX 2070 Super graphics card with 8GB of GDDR6 SDRAM; and a Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 Snow 750-watt power supply. The boot drive is an ADATA Legend 850 PCIe 4.0 SSD. (The reviewed SSD is tested as a secondary data drive.) The motherboard employs an air-cooled (fan-based) heatsink over the PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot that can be placed over the tested SSD, as I did when benchmarking the P510.We put the P510 through our usual internal solid-state drive benchmarks: Crystal DiskMark 6.0, UL's PCMark 10 Storage, and UL's 3DMark Storage benchmark. The last measures a drive's performance in several gaming-related load and launch tasks. Among the comparison drives seen in the tables below, I included not only most of the Gen 5 SSDs we have reviewed, but three of the fastest PCI Express 4.0 SSDs we have come across: the WD Black SN850X, the Samsung SSD 990 Pro, and Micron's own Crucial T500.Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. We use this test to determine if our tested speeds align with the manufacturer's rated speeds. The P510 effectively matched its rated sequential read and write speeds; both scores were within 1% of their ratings. Sequential read speed was a cut above the earliest PCIe 5.0 SSDs we tested, but well short of the Crucial T705 and below the second tier of Gen 5 speedsters; write speed was the lowest of the PCIe 5 SSDs in our comparison group. The P510's read and write speeds were considerably faster than any of the PCIe 4.0 SSDs we've reviewed, which have sequential read and write speed ratings of up to 7,500MBps and 7,000MBps, respectively.Crystal DiskMark also measures a drive's 4K (small-file) read and write speeds; while the P510's 4K read speed was very similar to most of our comparison drives (both PCIe 4.0 and 5.0), its write score was the highest (by a hair) among a close range of scores of all the Gen 5 drives and well above the Gen 4 SSDs with which we compared it. Good 4K write performance is especially important for an SSD used as a boot drive, though we test them as secondary drives.As impressive as the raw speed of the P510 and other PCI Express 5.0 drives is, it's of little use if your SSD can't quickly perform the tasks you need it for. The PCMark 10 Storage Overall test measures a drive's speed in performing various routine tasks such as launching Windows, loading games and creative apps, and copying both small and large files. The P510's PCMark Overall score was the lowest of the Gen 5 SSDs we have reviewed, about 10% lower than the next-closest Gen 5 SSD, the Seagate FireCuda 540. Compared with the Gen 4 SSDs in our comparison group, the P510's score was better than the WD SN850X but worse than the Crucial T500 and the Samsung SSD 990 Pro.The PCMark 10 Overall score is an aggregate of the results of individual tests, which consist of various simulated system tasks, or "traces." The P510's scores on these tests were underwhelming relative to our comparison drives. It was in the middle of the pack in Windows loading, but fared worse in our game-launching tests, with low scores (among PCIe 4.0 as well as PCIe 5.0 SSDs) for Battlefield 5 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, while coming in second to last at Overwatch, ahead of the Samsung SSD Pro 990. In Adobe program launching, the P510 had the lowest score in Premiere Pro and tied for the second-lowest score on the Photoshop launching test with the Crucial T500, while edging out the WD SN850X. In the ISO Copy trace, although its score was below the PCIe 5 drives in our comparison group, it easily beat the Gen 4 SSDs. The 3DMark Storage benchmark tests an SSD's proficiency in performing various gaming-related tasks. In it, the P510 was in the thick of a close pack of four SSDs that trailed the T705 by a large margin.Based on its benchmark scores, the Crucial P510 is best for straight-line file transfers, copying, archiving, and accessing data. It's a mainstream SSD, so we wouldn't expect it to perform like the top-end Gen 5 speedsters we've reviewed, and indeed, its performance was more in line with some of the elite PCIe 4.0 sticks we compared it with.