Crucial's P310 launched late last year as a PCIe 4.0 expansion option for the woefully underwhelming storage capacity found in some of our favorite handheld gaming PCs. Yeah, you can grab a Steam Deck OLED or Asus ROG Ally with a ton of storage straight out of the gate, but the uptick in pricing just isn't cost-effective compared to the base models. Given both of them and their ilk in general typically do support M.2 drives, and it's relatively easy to upgrade them, it often made more sense to just replace that storage later down the line with a larger, better, aftermarket SSD instead.
That's where the first P310 came into play. Complete with its compact 2230 form factor. Crucial's P310, Western Digital's WD_Black SN770M, Corsair's MP600 Mini, and a spate of other 2230 drives provided solid solutions for that problem; however, in the case of WD and Crucial, they both came with significant drawbacks.
