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The 232-Layer Micron TLC (B58R) flash takes up the mantle from Micron’s very successful 176-Layer TLC (B47R). Micron has gone from four planes to six and has made other improvements that make multi-planar operations faster for superior internal parallelization. The move to 1Tb (128GB) dies over 512Gb (64GB) is also an important consideration for capacity: bigger dies, more storage. The T700 shaved a full 40 seconds off the Gigabyte PCIe 5’s 450GB write time. That’s bookin’. Shorter bars are better.
Since 2004, I have worked on PCMag’s hardware team, covering at various times printers, scanners, projectors, storage, and monitors. I currently focus my testing efforts on 3D printers, pro and productivity displays, and drives and SSDs of all sorts. ATTO Disk Benchmark showcases data transfer performance by reading and writing data in chunks of increasing sizes from 512 bytes to 64 MB. In ATTO, the T700 performed well, too, but there were instances where the P5 Plus outperformed it. Specifically, the 512B and 1KB write tests. In repeated tests, I found the T700 lagging behind in some of the smaller data size write tests. While gaming, both SSDs ran around 66-68 degrees Celsius, s gaming performance was unaffected. Overall, I noticed that having this dual-SSD setup raised my motherboard temperature reading by 2-3 degrees Celsius. We put the T700 through our usual internal solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, and UL's 3DMark Storage Benchmark, which measures a drive's performance in a number of gaming-related tasks. For our comparison charts, we pitted the Crucial drive against the Aorus 10000 and a slew of the fastest PCI Express 4.0 SSDs we've tried. Each test is performed on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that as any drive fills up, performance will decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, and other factors.Pci 5 only will be good for server. For desktop for now only heat and compatible issues. Maybe two years beyond to be slim and the software can use that speed.There are no heat nor compatibility issues as long as you are using a PCIe 5 M.2 mobo. Don't be fooled by the elephant sized heatsinks that some companies are supplying with Gen 5 SSDs. In most if not all cases the mobo supplied SSD heatsink/cover plate is more than enough cooling to prevent throttling. The large heatsinks are a marketing ploy. Unfortunately, most actual read/write tasks your SSD performs are not dealing with neat, sequentially stored data. And in the tougher, more representative random read/write benchmarks, the picture of the T700 is more mixed: one of a drive that not only struggles to significantly outpace last-gen SSDs, but is sometimes slightly slower than them. With the motherboard heatsink installed, the T700 was hitting a temperature of 81 degrees Celsius under peak load when benchmarking. The P5 Plus ran cooler in comparison, hitting up to 70 degrees Celsius. Thermal throttling is a real concern with PCIe 5.0 SSDs, and the T700 started hitting its limits when pushed. While the Gen 5 SSDs are almost 7 months late they have merit for some desktop applications. They will not offer any practical advantage over PCIe 3 or 4 unless you are moving a lot of data at once. There's also the question of how much DirectStorage could make faster SSDs useful in games. I suspect even if done properly, we're still looking at a current maximum of maybe 10-20GB of data for a game engine, level, and textures. So, you could potentially do 20GB in under two seconds with Gen5, versus three seconds with a fast Gen4, versus five seconds with a fast Gen3. But when I launch stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2 and it takes over a minute to get into the game, any of those sounds amazing!Yeah I couldn't agree more. In the enterprise/server space SSDs speeds will always be hungry for more bandwidth/IO. And with direct storage we may see some uses down the line but for now I think any fast 4.0 SSD is more than enough for most home users.
At least the reward for all that handiwork is, in certain conditions, some truly next-generation performance. CrystalDiskMark’s sequential read/write speed tests showed the T700 really could reach 12400MB/s read and 11800MB/s, plus a few megabytes’ change, and although the AS SSD sequential tests produced lower results they were still several gigabytes per second above those of the very fastest PCIe 4.0 drives. The T700 is an excellent demonstration of what this generation of computing is capable of. If you have a new-generation system or are planning on building one, the T700 is worth considering, especially if you want the best hardware. You’re going to get cutting-edge performance, and even in the worst-case scenario, with a heatsink on, you’ll likely get performance that matches any PCIe 4.0 SSD.Nothing revs a storage reviewer’s engine more than a large jump in mainstream performance. Hitting that long skinny pedal for me was Crucial’s T700 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD, which transferred data a full gigabyte-per-second faster than any SSD we’ve tested to date. All I can say is, “Yowser!” Crucial T700 price, design, and specs Typical I/O performance as measured using CrystalDiskMark® with a queue depth of 512 and write cache enabled. Windows 11 Core isolation disabled for performance measurement. Fresh out-of-box (FOB) state is assumed. For performance measurement purposes, the SSD may be restored to FOB state using the secure erase command. System variations will affect measured results.
Part-specific certification as required by Taiwan's Management Methods for Controlling Pollution by Electronic Information Products. The T700 is not the first PCIe 5.0 SSD on the market, as the Inland TD510 has been out for a while. The T700 is also not the first to be announced by a big brand name, as we can see with the Corsair MP700. However, the T700 is the fastest implementation of the E26, as it can reach up to 12.4 GBps in sequential read workloads thanks to its speedier flash with an I/O speed of 2000 MT/s. This is in contrast to the 1600 MT/s flash used in the earlier E26 SSDs, limiting them to around 10 GBps. The E26 controller supports up to 2400 MT/s flash, which would put a cap of around 15 GBps. But for now, the T700 is the fastest around. It's important to note that Crucial explicitly states that a heatsink or some form of cooling is required. Running it without a heatsink effectively voids the warranty and could result in a damaged drive. Don't buy a Gen5 drive and use it without a heatsink, in other words. (Testing the T700 in our Asus board with the motherboard heatspreader results in effectively identical performance to Crucial's own cooler, incidentally. YMMV depending on your particular mobo, heatspreader, and case configuration, naturally.) Where it really shone was on the File Copy test—which measures an SSD's speed in copying many small files—posting a score that was nearly 60% faster than the nearest PCIe 4.0 drive. The T700 did nearly as well in the ISO copy test, which measures a drive's speed in copying several large files. In 3DMark Storage, an aggregate test that measures a drive's prowess at a variety of gaming-related tasks, it set another new high score, topping the Aorus as well as all the PCIe 4.0 drives. The TBW (terabytes that may be written) rating for the T700 is 600TB per terabyte of capacity. If you weren’t aware, TBW is the mitigating factor in SSD warranties, (five years in this case), as miles are to the years in an automobile warranty. How does the Crucial T700 perform?
Verdict: The Best Gen 5 SSD So Far
The T700 is a PCIe Gen 5.0 x4 NVMe M.2 SSD, rated for up to 12,400 MB/s in sequential read speeds, and up to 11,800 MB/s in sequential write speeds, as well as random read speeds and write speeds of up to 1,500K. It's a double-sided 2280 M.2 drive featuring Phison's bleeding-edge E26 controller, 4GB of LPDDR4 memory, and Microsoft DirectStorage API.
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