Considering that M.2 SSDs are often stowed away, lying either under components or on the other side of the board, you don't necessarily need to care about how they look. Nevertheless, RGB can be put on basically anything, and naturally, there are RGB SSDs you can buy, even in the M.2 form factor. There aren't a ton of them out there, but thankfully Patriot's Viper VPR400 comes with RGB and doesn't make any critical compromises that would normally plague such a niche product. The way they want to sell them at a higher per TB cost than low TB drives runs against consumer's understanding of the world. While PCIe 5.0 SSDs have arrived on the scene, they're not great for everyone for a few reasons: they're expensive, they're very hot, and all that extra performance doesn't mean much for most users today. PCIe 4.0 SSDs will remain the go-to for the average user for the time being, and one of the best you can get (perhaps even the best) is Corsair's MP600 Pro NH, a superfast drive that comes in a wide variety of capacities and costs very little. PCIe 5.0 SSDs have just hit the market, though for the moment they're really for enthusiast tier desktops and not much else. Still, PCIe 5.0 is a big deal for SSDs since it pushes the limit from 8,000MB/s with M.2 running PCIe 4.0 to 16,000MB/s with M.2 running PCIe 5.0. We're only in the first generation of PCIe 5.0 drives, so none of them are even close to 16,000MB/s, but Crucial's T700 is topping the leaderboard today and it's not even the most expensive PCIe 5.0 drive out there.

Kioxia originally demonstrated the technical specifications for BiCS5 at ISSCC 2019. The original design was a 128-layer quad-plane design with a CMOS-under-Array (CuA) configuration. However, the BiCS we tested here is a 112-layer dual-plane design without CuA. These compromises suggest a bigger focus on production efficiency (density and yield), which explains the 1Tb dies used here. These characteristics have potentially impacted other drives by WD that have had their flash upgraded or replaced. Samsung's 990 Pro is the company's latest high-end NVMe SSD, replacing the older 980 Pro. With sequential reads up to 7,450MB/s and writes up to 6,900MB/s, it's the second fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD in this entire collection, and although it's more expensive than the MP600 Pro NH, it does have some upsides. Yes the need for higher than 2TB SSDs in the consumer space is rather limited given how easy it is to offload games and such to hard drives, as well as using 2-2TB NVMe drives in spanning RAID, but still by 2022 you would think 4TB and higher NVMe SSDs would be far more affordable than they are. If you're leaning towards a budget build, you might want to consider buying Solidigm's P41 Plus or even Samsung 970 EVO Plus. Both drives have similar performance and will do very well thanks to their still good random performance, but the P41 Plus is much more efficient and will be much more suitable for laptops. This flash is more or less equivalent to 128-layer TLC from other manufacturers, such as that found on the 980 Pro by Samsung or on the Gold P31 by SK hynix. BiCS5 should come with a bit lower latency than the old 96-layer BiCS4 flash that’s been used in many products and often as an alternative to Micron’s 96-layer B27B TLC. We’ve seen good results from it on the SN570 and, especially, the SN770.

Because PCIe 5.0 SSDs are so fast, they also need to be more durable if they're going to last as long as PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and to this end the T700 gets 600TBW worth of endurance per terabyte. That's pretty much the standard for PCIe 5.0, though it is much less than the FireCuda 540's 1000TBW per terabyte, and though the T700 thankfully has a five-year-long warranty. Anyways...having only one capacity option is what stops it from being a tempting buy. Half of the market isn't even focused on having 4TB name...even Samsung hasn't bothered with it.

Anyways...having only one capacity option is what stops it from being a tempting buy. Half of the market isn't even focused on having 4TB nvme...even Samsung hasn't bothered with it. The Phison E18 SSD controller has proven to be quite the contender even when burdened by 64 dies. This one seems to have been manufactured during the 28th week of 2021. It’s likely the firmware has been optimized for this NAND as well as for managing that many dies. Sabrent will also give you a copy of Acronis True Image to help transfer your current installation across. The drive also comes with a custom heatsink so that it can perform well (though given that most motherboards these days come with a heatsink, that's probably not necessary), and there's also a separate thinner heatsink for those who want to install it inside a PS5. The biggest weakness of the P41 Plus is the performance. In my review, it only got up to 4,000MB/s in reads and 3,300MB/s in writes, just under the official rating of 4,125MB/s in reads and 3,325MB/s in writes. Great pricing helps make up for this, but so does Solidigm's custom Synergy software and drivers. Virtually every other company actually just uses Microsoft's default SSD drivers, but Solidigm's custom drivers boost performance by a decent amount, despite it being super low-end. Additionally, its 400TBW endurance isn't bad either.Oh I'm sorry my bad on that part. Still the general consumer hasn't even adapted to the 4tb NVMe capacity yet so having 8tb at this point seems pointless and expensive...