Crucial P310 - M.2 PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD - 4TB

The Crucial P310 is a budget Gen4 NVMe drive built on Micron NAND without a DRAM cache. It reaches 7100/6000 MB/s sequential speeds on paper, which is competitive for the price tier, but DRAMless architecture shapes what it's actually good for.

Architecture

Without dedicated DRAM, the P310 relies on Host Memory Buffer (HMB), borrowing a small slice of system RAM to manage its mapping table. This works fine for typical consumer workloads like OS drives, gaming, and general storage, but sustained random writes and cache-busting sequential transfers will see more inconsistency than a DRAM-equipped drive at the same interface speed.

Capacities and Endurance

Available from 500GB to 4TB. Endurance is moderate: the 2TB variant is rated at 440 TBW, which is adequate for consumer use but not a drive you'd want running heavy write workloads. Five-year warranty across the lineup.

Performance in Practice

For reading data, the P310 performs well. Boot times, application launches, and game loads are not meaningfully different from more expensive Gen4 drives in everyday use. Write-heavy scenarios like large file ingestion and video editing scratch are where the DRAMless design shows its limits under sustained load.

Limitations

The DRAMless design is the primary constraint. Mixed workloads with heavy random write patterns will occasionally stall while the drive rebuilds its mapping. It's not a flaw so much as an honest tradeoff for the price.

Best for: Budget builds, secondary storage, and OS/gaming drives where read performance matters more than sustained write throughput.

Avoid if: You're running workloads with heavy random writes, using it as a video editing scratch disk, or can afford a DRAM-equipped Gen4 drive for only a small price difference.