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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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. 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. 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 T700 shaved a full 40 seconds off the Gigabyte PCIe 5’s 450GB write time. That’s bookin’. Shorter bars are better.

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.) 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 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. 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. 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.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.

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