Crucial’s new PCIe 5 SSD sips power to save battery

How fast do you need your PC’s storage to be? If the answer is always “faster” (even if you don’t actually need that speed for gaming), you might want to check out Crucial’s latest PCIE 5 drive. The P510 that just debuted at CES is claiming read speeds of up to 11,000 megabytes per second, with 9,550 on the write side of things.

That’s incredibly fast, but it isn’t quite speedy enough to beat the fastest PCIE 5 drive we’ve tested. That would be Crucial’s own T705 drive, unbeaten after almost a year.

But the interesting twist here is that Crucial claims the P510 drive can do this using 25 percent less power than its previous fifth-gen designs. And that is indeed a big deal if you’re putting this thing in a laptop, where every watt counts in terms of battery life.

The company also announced a new version of its P310 fouth-gen drive with a heatsink in the box, all the better to work with the PS5 (though it’ll fit fine into any M.2 2280 slot). That drive is rated for 7100MB/s read speeds, which is on the zippy side for an older design.

Various new options for existing DDR5 memory lines, including Pro Overclocking modules as dense as 32GB on a stick, round out the CES announcements.

The P510 SSD should be available starting in the spring (that’s northern hemisphere talk for “probably before July”) in 1TB and 2TB flavors, while the new heatsink-equipped P310 will go on sale later this month. Prices were not shared, womp womp.