I bought this drive during the Amazon "Prime Day in October 2023" event alongside a Sabrent M.2 external USB enclosure. I just finished writing an unnecessarily long winded and convoluted positive review of that Sabrent product and recommended purchasing one of those.
I purchased an HP Pavilion 790-0010 "Gaming" PC from Amazon for my daughter circa June 2018. That HP PC came stock with a 1TB WD Blue HDD. Not long into the life of that PC I bought a 512GB WD Blue M.2 SATA SSD to install into the empty M.2 socket on the motherboard of this HP PC. My plan which I carried out was to migrate the contents of the stock included WD Blue 1TB HDD to the M.2 SATA SSD.
The foil to this plan was that HP did NOT include a screw to hold down any M.2 drive that would be mounted into the empty M.2 socket. I had to source my own mounting screw in order to install the WD M.2 SATA SSD. WD did not include a screw. In the DIY space, the mounting screw comes with the motherboard. I am sure with HP mass production, that including a screw for an empty M.2 socket for a mass produced OEM computer would have added astronomical product cost so HP figured that no one would use this empty socket and saved the expense of including a mounting screw for an empty M.2 socket.
Fast forward to October 2023, my daughter has filled her WD 512GB M.2 SATA SSD with many Steam and Blizzard games. She needed more space. This Crucial P3 drive was on sale for a great price and I picked one up. I have used various Crucial drives and memory products in the past and knew this would be a great product.
My plan was to use Clonezilla to clone the WD M.2 SATA SSD to the Crucial P3 NVME drive using the aforementioned Sabrent external M.2 enclosure.
When I received the Crucial P3 in hand and was preparing to open the retail package so as to install the P3 drive, I noticed a distinct rattle sound from the package. It was a small rattle that changed depending on how I held the retail package in my hand. It sounded like a small metalic object was rattling around in the package against plastic.
I opened the Crucial P3 driev ratail package and slid out the plastic packaging that contains the P3 drive. To my delight, shock and awe, there wsas a carve out in the plastic packaging that held a sole metal mounting screw.
I nearly wept and was overcome with joy of such a magnitude that I cannot convey with words.
In a landscape and market place of many competent products that perform such a benign task of storage, I was ecstatic that Crucial thought to include a mounting screw for their P3 drive.
Had this drive been purchased straight away for my daughter's HP PC I would not have had to source a mounting screw as I did with the WD M.2 SATA SSD drive.
The drive itself is good. For sake of comparison, my daughter's PC is connected to our ISP router via Netgear branded Power over Ethernet adapters which were also purchased from Amazon.
With the old WD M.2 SATA SSD, game downloads to the WD SSD drive topped out around 8MB/s per the Steam client. With the Crucial P3 NVME drive, downloads now top out around 11MB/s per the Steam client. Granted it's not the same level of testing Gamer's Nexus would give you but a quick eyeball in a like for like scenario of downloading big games from Steam do show that the NVME drive has a slight performance edge over the M.2 SATA drive. I am not dinging WD, it's just showing that NVME is a bit quicker in this HP PC than a SATA SSD.
I realize the Crucial P3 is a NVME 1.3 drive and not of the newer Gen 4 or Gen 5 generations which this HP PC does not support. I was going for an inexpensive storage upgrade and the P3 definitely delivered....with a screw!
I would buy this again and recommend other people to buy this too.
| Hard Drive | 1 TB Solid State Drive |
|---|
