Get the 1TB Crucial P5 NVMe SSD with a free heatsink for £80
It equals our best SSD deal of last week.
The Crucial P5 is a solid PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD with strong enough performance to be used as your primary OS drive, and today it's been discounted to just £80 at Scan - with a free Akasa M.2 NVMe SSD heatsink. That's an absolute bargain, so let us tell you all about it!
First, the deal itself. The cheapest we've ever seen the Crucial P5 before now is £75, a price we spotted on Amazon last week and has since expired. The fact you get a free Akasa heatsink worth £5 for £80 means that this deal is just as good, in my eyes, especially as it meshes nicely with this drive's high performance.
So, let's talk a little about that. The P5 is one of the fastest PCIe 3.0 drives that we've seen, with a rated read speed of 3400MB/s and write speeds of 3000MB/s. That's some six to seven times faster than your standard SATA SSD (limited to ~550MB/s), and will make a huge difference to file transfer times.
Random read and write speeds are also competitive, thanks to the inclusion of TLC NAND and a DRAM cache, and you should see a small advantage in game load times by switching from a SATA to NVMe drive. (Not as much as you'd find going from a mechanical hard drive to a SATA SSD, but still measurably better!)
There are even faster PCIe 4.0 drives, but these tend to cost far more than £100 for a 1TB model - and they're only really useful in the PS5, where they're required, and for content creators working with truly gigantic files - such as 4K or 8K video clips, for instance.
The included Akasa heatsink is quite basic, with a single-sided aluminium construction, but it should still dissipate heat effectively from its four fins. This helps keep performance consistently high even in hot PC cases, although you will need to ensure you have sufficient clearance to install it.
Looking at Amazon right now, if you don't need the DRAM cache and TLC NAND of the Crucial P5 for that extra random performance, you can save a few quid by going with the cheaper Crucial P2 instead. It's £65 at Amazon and is nearly as fast at 2400MB/s, although as we mentioned above sustained performance won't be as good. This is a better choice for a secondary drive, where you won't be installing your OS, but can perform this role if required. Personally, I'd go for the faster P5 and its free heatsink here for an extra £15, but it's good to know your options!
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below, and be sure to check out our best gaming SSD recommendations for more on how and why choosing the right SSD can make a huge difference to PC gaming! Thanks for joining us and we'll see you on the next one.