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. 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.

The P5 Plus isn’t the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD on the market (that would be the Samsung 990 Pro), but it’s positioned well to be compared against the T700 and the performance gains that come with the new standard. 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?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.

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 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. Whether in particular video game devs will make full use of it, such as to depict e.g. cities to not look like Stalinist Moscow (that is using one type of texture, which gets reused on various walls, and therefore doesn't need to load much when such a texture fills half the screen, with three types of balconies reused to make it look not as monotone) - that isn't clear of course. But the option is there, including moving towards 8K, and not using artificial loading screens, such as an elevator ride between 2 areas as the only option to move between these two areas. Non-heatsink versions of the Crucial T700 must be installed with a motherboard or alternate heatsink to achieve optimal performance.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 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. 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. 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.

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.) 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.) While the PCMark 10 Overall Storage score aggregates the results of multiple tasks, you can also see the scores for some of its individual trace-based tests. In them, the T700 consistently edged the Aorus, mostly by narrow margins. But although it topped the field in the Windows loading trace, its scores in many of the other tests were only middling compared with the PCIe 4.0 SSDs. However, there is very little to demonstrate the use of this faster storage for practical purposes. Games with DirectStorage aren’t quite here yet, and existing games are unlikely to have any noticeable performance gains with a PCIe 5.0 SSD. I expect this to change in the coming months as DirectStorage games release, and we get better cooling solutions for SSDs.

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. Gamer Network Limited, Gateway House, 28 The Quadrant, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 1DN, United Kingdom, registered under company number 03882481. 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.

Crucial T700’s 48GB transfers showed great improvement in the real world, unlike the Gigabyte. Shorter bars are better. 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. The T700 is absolutely the current king of the hill, and it’s not even a particularly close contest. If you have the required PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot, it’s the NVMe SSD you want—assuming you have the required monetary wherewithal to pay for the privilege.

Based on internal gaming performance results measured with 3DMark® Storage Benchmark SSD performance test for gamers. Actual results may vary. The Crucial T700 sample we have in the labs today is unquestionably the fastest consumer SSD in the world, at least for now, delivering up to a blistering 12.4 GB/s of sequential throughput and 1.5 million random IOPS over the PCIe 5.0 interface. That's 70% faster than today's highest-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and 20% faster than the current crop of PCIe 5.0 drives. 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.