T-CREATE CinemaPr P31 External SSD 1 TB Review
The T-CREATE CinemaPr P31 is a 1 TB external SSD designed for camera and mobile video rigs, offering excellent read speeds and a mechanical mounting system suited for camera rigs.
The T-CREATE CinemaPr P31 is a 1 TB external SSD designed for camera and mobile video rigs.
It was tested with igor'sLAB SSD Next 1.0.61, confirming excellent use of its negotiated 10-Gbit/s USB link, with read speeds up to 1,098.37 MB/s.
However, the drive also reveals a comparatively small 33.792 GB pSLC area and sustained write performance of about 354 MB/s after the cache is exhausted.
Its mechanical mounting system is well-suited to camera rigs, while the H.265 8K60 test produced four brief deadline misses despite an average data rate far below the post-pSLC write rate.
Technical Specifications
| Read speed | up to 1,098.37 MB/s |
|---|---|
| Write speed | approximately 354 MB/s |
| pSLC area | 33.792 GB |
| USB link | 10 Gbit/s SuperSpeedPlus with UASP |
The drive strongly favors large transfers, with 4 KiB reads and writes reaching 97.66 and 49.18 MB/s, respectively.
At 64 KiB, read performance rose to 1,015.87 MB/s, while write performance reached 421.43 MB/s.
At 1 MiB, the corresponding results were 1,095.19 MB/s read and 882.89 MB/s write.
A zero-fill sweep produced 888.45 MB/s with fully random data and 888.17 MB/s with 100 percent zeros, showing no relevant dependence on easily compressible patterns.
Application Profiles
| Application | Read speed | Write speed |
|---|---|---|
| Premiere Pro | 1,079.28 MB/s | 945.55 MB/s |
| HandBrake | 1,088.60 MB/s | 660.18 MB/s |
| C/C++ Build | 311.56 MB/s | 444.42 MB/s |
The product is supplied already seated in an external mounting cage, with the USB-C cable and mounting hardware packaged separately.
The short USB-C-to-USB-C cable is appropriate for a camera rig, where excessive cable length can create securing problems and additional connector strain.
The cage provides several 1/4-inch mounting points, with the included hardware consisting of a larger knurled screw with a slip-resistant contact surface and a second screw variant with a folding bracket.
The mechanical design provides a dedicated camera-rig solution instead of requiring Velcro or a universal mount.
The IP67 claim remains manufacturer-specified rather than independently tested.
The drive reports the model “TC CinemaPr,” firmware W1128AM0 and a matching serial number through ATA and SCSI VPD data.
Twenty-four vendor-specific SMART attributes follow a Silicon-Motion-like pattern, but this is heuristic evidence and does not identify a specific controller.
The 33.792 GB pSLC result was reproduced three times at practically identical fill levels within the same 0.512 GB detector interval, supporting a fixed-or-capped candidate classification.
However, further tests at substantially different fill levels are required to distinguish a fixed cache from a dynamically shrinking cache with an upper limit.
The full test used igor'sLAB SSD Next 1.0.61 on an MSI MEG X870E GODLIKE system with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, Windows 11 Build 26200 and approximately 205 GB of RAM.
All I/O measurements used the native Windows C++ component with ABI 0x00010007, with the run recording 330,043 native measurement operations without a Python fallback.
Windows used the Balanced power plan, and the Windows write cache was enabled, with individual modules defining their own I/O and cache conditions.
The video profile wrote 100 GB using HEVC/H.265 at 8K60 with a reference bitrate of 800 Mbit/s, equivalent to 100 MB/s.
The test is a reference workload, not a guarantee for every camera, codec or variable-bitrate stream.
The pSLC procedure confirmed a mathematical steady-state criterion but was not a complete SNIA-SSS-PTS test, with purge and the formal two-capacity WIPC not included.
The IP67 rating was not checked with a standard-compliant dust and immersion test, and the 4 TB model's advertised 2,000 MB/s performance was not directly comparable with the tested 1 TB version.
The 1 TB CinemaPr P31 occupies the conventional 10-Gbit/s portable SSD segment in pure read performance, with its measured 1,098.37 MB/s read rate making excellent use of the available link.
However, the product's differentiation is its mechanical integration: the cage, 1/4-inch mounting options and short cable are specifically useful for camera and mobile video rigs.
The main technical caveat is the distinction between burst and sustained writes, with the first approximately 33.8 GB able to be written at nearly 1 GB/s, but the confirmed post-pSLC rate being about 354 MB/s.
That is sufficient for many compressed H.264 and H.265 streams and for some ProRes, ProRes-RAW and BRAW configurations, but the actual bitrate must be checked for less compressed formats.
The 8K60 HEVC test illustrates the limitation, with the average requirement being only 100 MB/s, yet four brief frame deadlines were missed, with the lowest observed value at 91.11 MB/s.
A camera buffer may absorb such events, but the result does not justify unconditional approval for production-critical recording.
Reducing the frame rate does not automatically reduce bitrate, with a conservative range suggested by the test being approximately 560 to 600 Mbit/s, not a camera guarantee.
