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Crucial T700 1TB Gen5 NVMe M.2 SSD - Up to 11,700 MB/s - DirectStorage Enabled - CT1000T700SSD3 - Gaming, Photography, Video Editing & Design - Internal Solid State Drive

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Nice stuff. With current-gen software, it may not seem worth it to get it for. But the technical possibility to load 64 GB into RAM in about 5 seconds (and if needed, reload), that's that. And e.g. both RTX 4090 and RX 7900 XTX have 24 GB of VRAM. So it is not like there would be nothing to load the data to. 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.)

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. 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.Internal drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 (22H2) 64-bit running on an X790 (PCIe 5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 modules (64GB of memory total). Intel integrated graphics are used. The 48GB transfer tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk taking up 58GB of the 64GB total memory. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, which also contains the operating system. Please note that the sequential numbers are surely huge. They are going to help with sequential data transfers like copying and pasting big files. However, with the random performance actually replicating the normal day-to-day tasks, gaming, and content creation, you will hardly see any difference as compared to the Gen 4 SSDs.

Compared to Gen5 SSD performance without DirectStorage, based on internal test results with supported GPU that uses GPU decompression. 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. The PCMark 10 Overall Storage benchmark measures a drive's speed in performing a variety of routine tasks such as launching Windows, loading games and creative apps, and copying both small and large files. The Crucial T700 edged the Aorus 10000 with a new PC Labs high score, handily beating our PCIe 4.0 comparison drives. 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! Under typical conditions for airflow and ambient temperature, our pre-installed premium heatsink allows the T700 Gen5 SSD to run at max workload without the need to thermal throttle. Please ensure your drive has proper airflow for maximum performance.Part-specific certification as required by Taiwan's Management Methods for Controlling Pollution by Electronic Information Products. The T700 comes with or without a heatsink, depending on your needs. If your motherboard already has a substantial M.2 heatsink, or if you want to install your own solution, the bare drive is an option. In that case, the drive has a copper thermal label that is not intended to be removed. This SSD is not intended to be used without a heatsink, such as in a laptop or PlayStation 5.

The terabytes-written spec is a manufacturer's estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. Micron warranties the Crucial T700 for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in data writes, whichever comes first. But the drive's durability rating is such that unless you're writing unusually large amounts of data to the SSD, it's a safe bet that the T700 will last the full warranty period. The drive supports AES-256 encryption and TCG Opal 2.01, including for crypto erase (TCG OPAL was not implemented at the time of testing). Crucial also has other optimizations in the works, but the drives we're testing are considered Engineering Samples (ES), so the firmware is not final.Crucial expects that performance in random write workloads will improve in the future. Software and Accessories 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. 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? 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.The T700 is slated to be the first of a new set of faster PCIe 5.0 SSDs that offer even better performance than what we saw with the initial PCIe 5.0 SSD we covered in our Phison E26 SSD controller preview. The T700 uses the Phison E26 SSD controller, a robust design used in several other 5.0 SSDs, paired with speedy 232-Layer TLC flash, thus creating the fastest SSD we’ve ever tested in our labs. Impressively, it delivers this level of performance with passive cooling thanks to its well-designed heatsink, but if you remove the heatsink the SSD will also work well in motherboards with proper M.2 heatsink coverage. Note that the WD SN850X is a PCIe 4.0 drive included for comparison. It’s among the fastest 4.0 SSDs we’ve tested and was re-tested on our latest test bed. (See the “How we test” section at the end of this article.) 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. It's still very early in the PCI Express 5.0 game, but the Crucial T700 is the best Gen 5 SSD we've encountered to date. It's offered in the highest capacity (4TB) and is available with or without a heatsink; it has 256-bit AES encryption built in; and it's the fastest drive we've benchmarked so far.

Gamer Network Limited, Gateway House, 28 The Quadrant, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 1DN, United Kingdom, registered under company number 03882481. 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. This SSD is not intended to be used without a heatsink, such as in a laptop or PlayStation 5.It would be illuminating to test without a heatsink anyway. The current drive only starts to throttle after 0.2-0.25 TB continuous writes, so based on testing of previous drives without heatsinks, it's quite likely the only effect from operating this drive without a heatsink would be reducing that threshold to 'only' 100 GB or so. I would expect any testing that does not involve throwing around continuous hundreds of GB of data would not see any significant (or any) performance impact from removing the cosmetic greebly. Crucial’s T700 shattered all our benchmark and real world records, and did so by a rather wide margin. If your system features a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot, this SSD will take your storage performance to another level.

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.

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