Crucial P310 2 TB NVMe SSD review

It might not be the 1990s anymore (that’s the late 1900s to the Gen Zers), but that doesn’t mean console gaming is done and dusted, no sir. We’ve seen a whole slew of handheld gaming PCs arise over the last couple of years, and with it, a positive boom in the number of folk on the hunt to expand their storage on these plucky little devices too. After all what’s the point of picking up a handheld gaming PC if you can’t, you know, play all your favorite games on it when you’re on the move.

It’s a bit of a complicated mess, that said, the number of handhelds that support the M.2 2230 form factor is numerous, yet with an armada of PCIe drives out there, all touting different hardware configurations in the tiniest of form-factors, finding the right drive is, well, challenging. Crucial’s P310 2TB is breaking the mold a little bit on this one though. Not only is this thing radically affordable, coming in at just $220 for a 2 TB number it also delivers some stellar bursts of performance as it does so regardless of the PCIe spec it’s plugged into. Although with some fairly hefty caveats.

On the surface, the P310 is quite the intriguing prospect. It’s a single-sided M.2 2230 PCIe 4.0 drive (that form factor required to make it compatible with everything from the Steam Deck OLED, to the Asus ROG Ally, to even the biggest of gaming PCs as long as you have a heatsink on your mobo). It’s paired with a Phison E27T controller plus an array of Micron 232-Layer QLC NAND Flash to back it all up.

Now it’s that last part that’s the curious little addition. Although radically more affordable, and typically available in higher densities and capacities, QLC doesn’t usually provide performance at the same caliber as TLC NAND. In my experience, manufacturers will often pair QLC memory with a substantial DRAM cache on the drive to boost up sequential and random 4K performance, but once that cache is filled, that performance generally falls off a cliff. That cache is something the P310 lacks