The Crucial P1 1TB SSD Review: The Other Consumer QLC SSD

BAPCo SYSmark 2018

BAPCo's SYSmark 2018 is an application-based benchmark that uses real-world applications to replay usage patterns of business users, with subscores for productivity, creativity and responsiveness. Scores represnt overall system performance and are calibrated against a reference system that is defined to score 1000 in each of the scenarios. A score of, say, 2000, would imply that the system under test is twice as fast as the reference system.

SYSmark scores are based on total application response time as seen by the user, including not only storage latency but time spent by the processor. This means there's a limit to how much a storage improvement could possibly increase scores, because the SSD is only in use for a small fraction of the total test duration. This is a significant difference from our ATSB tests where only the storage portion of the workload is replicated and disk idle times are cut short to a maximum of 25ms.

Our SSD testing with SYSmark uses a different test system than the rest of our SSD tests. This machine is set up to measure total system power consumption rather than just the drive's power. The test is run five times in a row on each hardware configuration, and the average scores are reported below.

The creativity and productivity scenarios are relatively unaffected by storage performance, and depend much more on compute power. The responsiveness scores are more dependent on storage performance, but even so the differences between SSDs are fairly small. The Crucial P1 is outperforms the MX500 SATA drive but is a bit slower than the high-end NVMe drives.

Energy Usage

The SYSmark energy usage scores measure total system power consumption, excluding the display. Our SYSmark test system idles at around 26 W and peaks at over 60 W measured at the wall during the benchmark run. SATA SSDs seldom exceed 5 W and idle at a fraction of a watt, and the SSDs spend most of the test idle. This means the energy usage scores will inevitably be very close. A typical notebook system will tend to be better optimized for power efficiency than this desktop system, so the SSD would account for a much larger portion of the total and the score difference between SSDs would be more noticeable.

The energy consumption scores for the SSDs reflect the general trend that higher performance comes with the cost of worse power efficiency. SATA SSDs still lead the rankings for most efficient drive, and the hard drive that's included for comparison purposes required more energy than even the power-hungry Intel Optane SSD 900P.