Crucial seems to be moving to slower qlc nand for P2 ssd

Crucial seems to have started shipping P2 ssds with qlc nand while it was initially released with tlc chips. It’s not clear if Crucial has completely switched to qlc-nand, or if the company is still producing tlc variants at the same time.

The qlc variants were noticed and tested by Tom’s Hardware, which writes that the performance is significantly lower than the tlc models. Besides the use of qlc-nand, Crucial would not have changed anything about the drives. So the model name is still the same. As a result, users cannot see in advance which variant they are buying. In addition, many reviews are based on the faster TLC models, which can lead to confusion.

According to Tom’s Hardware, the performance differences vary per test, but in certain tests the P2 drive with qlc would be up to four times slower than the tlc variant, for example when copying a 6.5 GB zip file. In addition, the qlc model reached a speed of 98MB/s, compared to 428MB/s with the original Crucial P2. Even with a DiskBench run with a 50GB file, the qlc drive is significantly slower.

The qlc model also has more slc cache, with an amount of 135GB compared to the 24GB of the P2 with tlc-nand. However, the tlc variant was still faster, and the qlc variant’s write speeds slowed more than the tlc model after the slc cache filled up.

Crucial informs Tom’s Hardware that it has taken into account a possible switch to qlc-nand in its performance claims. At the time of release, the manufacturer advertised write speeds of 940MB/s, while according to Tom’s Hardware these are twice as high on a P2 500GB SSD with TLC-nand. The qlc performance is said to be more in line with the advertised speeds.

It is also unknown whether Crucial only produces QLC variants of the P2 SSD. Crucial already reported in a statement in 2020 that they could eventually switch to a ‘mix of TLC and QLC’. Company reported to PC Gamer last year“The Crucial P2 SSD currently uses Microns tlc memory, but over time may include a mix of Microns tlc and qlc nand. By mixing nand types with different capacities, we are able to accommodate product customizations and – make decisions based on emerging and changing technology, preferred capabilities and flexibility to match movements of the overall market.”

The Crucial P2