Xbox Series X and PS5 storage performance on PC for US$55? Crucial's 3000 MB/s P5 and P2 NVMe SSDs give PC gamers a cheaper option

Crucial just announced its P5 and P2 NVMe SSDs today. These PCIe Gen3 SSDs deliver up to 3400 MB/s and 3000 MB/s of read/write performance respectively. While these aren't exactly the fastest PCIe Gen3 SSDs we've seen, the Crucial P2 and Crucial P5 both deliver higher throughput than the Microsoft Xbox Series X's SSD storage solution. 

Importantly, Crucial has made this level of performance is made accessible to a wider range of PC gamers by selling these parts at a very competitive price point. The entry-level P2 2280 SSD is quite small, offering just 250 GB of storage space. However, it delivers Xbox Series X-beating SSD performance for just US$55. Crucial has yet to set pricing for higher performance P5 models. However, we expect pricing to be reasonable, considering the P2's cost of entry.

The PS5 and Xbox Series X's SSD storage solutions, with integrated compression algorithms, deliver a nearly 100x performance uplift over the 5400 RPM hard drives used by the eighth-gen consoles. The Sony Playstation 5's SSD in particular beats even the fastest Gen 4 SSDs on the market. While PC gamers might have GPUs and CPUs that are on par with the ninth-gen consoles, storage new SSDs might be in order. 

The Crucial P2 and P5 SSDs appear to be one of the first in a wave of affordable, high-speed SSDs, both Gen3 and Gen4. We look forward to seeing even more affordable NVMe SSDs in the months to come.