Name a better pairing than Micron and Phison. I'll wait. PB&J? Penn and Teller? Not a chance. That fateful mix of Micron flash and Phison controller has delivered some absolutely scorchingly fast SSDs over the years. From the T500 to the T705, it's a company that's gone from strength to strength, delivering some exceptional storage off the back of Phison's impressive controller tech. When the big blue boys reached out and offered me a chance to review its latest P510 budget SSD, complete with that shiny new E31T controller, well, I just couldn't resist.
Now, to be clear, the P510 isn't the first drive I've tested with the E31T controller. Not by a long way. Both Corsair's MP700 Elite and Kioxia's Exceria Plus G4 equally house the DRAMless unit inside. The difference, though, comes in the form of the flash. Whereas Corsair and Kioxia are utilizing the same 218-layer BiCS8 TLC solution, Crucial has gone in-house and picked up some of its own Micron 276-layer TLC NAND instead. Far denser and technically far faster memory, at least on paper, and that's what makes this drive interesting.
