Integral P Series 4 review

Integral is a long-established UK company which knows a thing or two about storage: in addition to SSDs it also makes USB flash drives and RAM. The P Series 4 is a step up from the V Series (V for value), and in our review we’ll find out if P does indeed stand for performance or not.

Integral P Series 4 review: Price

You can buy the 240GB Integral P Series 4 for £77.99 from MyMemory. 

The SSD is also available in 120, 480 and 960GB.

In 240GB form, it works out at 32p per GB. This drops to only 29p per GB if you opt for the £139.99 480GB drive. (It’s marginally cheaper at £130 from Amazon.)

There are plenty of competitors which cost around 20-25p per GB, so the P Series 4 is not the cheapest around.

Integral P Series 4 review: Features and design

The P Series 4 is based on TLC NAND storage. It lacks the endurance of pricier types of NAND and – in theory – is slower and cheaper than drives based on MLC or SLC.

Integral offers a three-year warranty with the P Series 4. If that’s too short, you can always pay a bit more for an SSD with longer cover. 

In the box you get an adaptor plate to make the drive fit snugly in a 9.5mm space – it’s a 7mm drive.

Aside from this, it’s a bare-drive kit: no 3.5in-to2.5in mount, cloning software or USB interface is provided.

Performance, as with all SSDs, varies with capacity, but the 240GB model on test here has a Phison S10 controller and is rated at 565MB/s read and 490MB/s write speeds.

The 480GB model is the fastest, increasing sequential write speeds to 530MB/s.

Integral P Series 4 review: Performance

Starting with Crystal Disk Mark, the P Series 4 certainly lives up to Integral’s claims. In fact, we saw almost exactly the figures printed on the box in the sequential read and write tests, with 564.4 and 497.9MB/s – the write speed 8MB/s above the claim.

Without a big queue depth, these figures drop to 509.3MB/s and 472.7MB/s and this is where rivals, such as the popular Samsung 850 Evo come into their own.

4K performance is mixed, with good read speeds and great write speeds with a queue of requests, but again, performance drops noticeably below the 850 Evo with no queue.

In AS SSD, we saw similar sequential and 4K performance, and a decent showing in the copy benchmarks where the Integral matched the 850 Evo overall, losing on the ISO test, but beating it squarely in the game test.