Tom's Hardware Verdict
The Crucial T700 offers high levels of performance and increased bandwidth over PCIe 4.0 drives. Its DirectStorage-optimized firmware and optional custom heatsink make it a good choice for enthusiasts as the fastest drive currently available.
Pros
- +
High all-around performance, fastest to date
- +
Effective passive heatsink, optionally DIY
- +
DirectStorage-optimized firmware
Cons
- -
Early adopter product with incoming competition
- -
Much higher price relative to fast PCIe 4.0 SSDs
- -
Only modest real-world performance gains
- -
Optional heatsink only does "okay"
Why you can trust Tom's Hardware
The Crucial T700 sets a new bar in performance for consumer SSDs, pushing speed higher than any other PCIe 5.0 NVMe drive on the market. It reigns as the king of the hill for sequential bandwidth and random IOPS, at least for now. Its native DirectStorage firmware optimization is an added benefit over almost all PCIe 4.0 SSDs for future gaming, as well. Crucial departs from the reference heatsink design with its own effective solution while also offering a cheaper, bare-drive variant for easier installation with motherboard and custom M.2 heatsinks. Together, this makes it a nice option for enthusiasts and early adopters.
The T700 is part of a wave of PCIe 5.0 SSDs about to deluge the consumer SSD market, all so far based on the same Phison E26 controller and Micron flash. This puts pressure on the manufacturers to differentiate their products in other ways, particularly with cooling. This could bring some innovation to the market, but current industry trends have created lingering concerns about the future of NAND that could eventually reduce the buyer’s pricing advantage from such competition.
Competing controllers are also on the way with InnoGrit’s IG5666 and SMI’s SM2508, and flash of the 232-Layer generation should be in wider production from Micron and other manufacturers. Faster drives based on the Phison E26 SSD Controller have also been announced offering up to 14 GBps, so early drives like the T700 have a limited window to shine. We’ll know more after Computex, which is currently underway, but many of these drives won’t be available until later in the year. At the time of review, this drive is the fastest of its crop.
Specifications
Product | 1TB | 2TB | 4TB |
---|---|---|---|
Pricing | $179.99/$209.99 | $339.99/$369.99 | $599.99/$629.99 |
Variants | Bare, Heatsinked | Bare, Heatsinked | Bare, Heatsinked |
Form Factor | M.2 2280 | M.2 2280 | M.2 2280 |
Interface / Protocol | PCIe 5.0 x4 | PCIe 5.0 x4 | PCIe 5.0 x4 |
Controller | Phison E26 | Phison E26 | Phison E26 |
DRAM | LPDDR4 | LPDDR4 | LPDDR4 |
Flash Memory | 232-Layer Micron TLC | 232-Layer Micron TLC | 232-Layer Micron TLC |
Sequential Read | 11,700 MBps | 12,400 MBps | 12,400 MBps |
Sequential Write | 9,500 MBps | 11,800 MBps | 11,800 MBps |
Random Read | 1,350K | 1,500K | 1,500K |
Random Write | 1,400K | 1,500K | 1,500K |
Security | N/A | N/A | N/A |
Endurance (TBW) | 600TB | 1,200TB | 2,400TB |
Part Number | CT1000T700SSD3/5 | CT2000T700SSD3/5 | CT4000T700SSD3/5 |
Warranty | 5-Year | 5-Year | 5-Year |
The Crucial T700 is available at 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities in both bare and heatsinked variants with MSRPs of $179.99/$209.99, $339.99/$369.99, and $599.99/$629.99, respectively. This is a significant premium over slower PCIe 5.0 SSDs like the heatsinked Inland TD510, where the 2TB model can be had for $249.99 at the time of review. It’s likely that the T700’s price will come down some time after launch, but these prices are what Crucial currently lists on its store.
Let's also be clear that paying $30 extra for the small metal heatsink is asking far too much. If you have a motherboard with a decent M.2 heatsink, you should just get that model. The included heatsink does work fine in our testing, but a $10 premium would be more in line with what you're getting.
The T700 is capable of reaching 12,400 MBps / 11,800 MBps for sequential reads and writes and 1,500 million IOPS for both random reads and writes. The primary benefit over slower PCIe 5.0 SSD variants is the sequential performance increase, but write IOPS are also higher. Crucial warranties this drive for the typical 600TB written per TB of capacity at up to five years. The retail drive has TCG Opal 2.01 support for encryption, which was not enabled in our previous Crucial T700 Preview.
Software and Accessories
Crucial offers its own SSD toolbox called the Crucial Storage Executive, which has the typical features you would expect. This includes drive information, SMART attributes, firmware updates, secure erase/sanitize, overprovisioning, and other features related to encryption. Third-party software like CloneZilla is recommended for cloning and imaging.
A Closer Look
The Crucial T700 can be purchased with or without its custom, passive heatsink. The heatsink is carefully designed to avoid the need for a fan, using a variety of materials and an airflow-optimized shape. The backplate makes it usable in motherboards that have flush thermal padding, which can be removed for this drive.
The non-heatsinked variant of the drive comes with a label that should not be removed, and the drive should not be operated without sufficient cooling applied. Such cooling would include a motherboard’s M.2 heatsink or your own aftermarket solution. The drive should not be used bare in the PlayStation 5 or in a laptop.
The drive itself has an SSD controller, one DRAM package, and two NAND packages on the top side. The rear side has two more NAND packages for a total of four. There's also a power management integrated circuit, or PMIC, labeled Phison.
The T700 utilizes Phison’s E26 SSD controller, an 8-channel design capable of running a bus speed of up to 2400 MT/s to help saturate four lanes of PCIe 5.0 connectivity. Initial E26 drives top out around 10 GBps at 1600 MT/s, but Crucial has opted for 2000 MT/s here. Future drives, some of which have been already announced, will push 2400 MT/s for 14 GBps or more. Higher speeds put more stress on the hardware, so cooling becomes more critical, especially with sustained workloads.
The 2TB T700 comes with 32Gb, or 4GB, of LPDDR4. This is more than enough memory even for the 4TB SKU. LPDDR4 is more power-efficient than DDR4 but the impact is not enough to help keep the E26 solution from being very power-hungry.
The flash is Micron’s 232-Layer TLC, or B58R, capable of running at 1600-2400 MT/s. This hexa-plane flash comes in 1Tb dies, so each 512GB package has four dies for a total of sixteen. Given the E26’s 8-channel design, it’s therefore possible that peak performance will be realized at the 4TB capacity.
MORE: Best SSDs
MORE: Best External SSDs and Hard Drives
MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs
MORE: All SSD Content
Shane Downing is a Freelance Reviewer for Tom’s Hardware US, covering consumer storage hardware.
-
Roland Of Gilead Eh, with the mentioning of heatsinks, it might have been good to include a temp graph!Reply
Just what temps are the drives hitting when they are being tested? -
kiniku A very insightful review of this product and PCI 5.0 NVM-e SSDs relevance today. I just bought a Solidigm P44 2TB for $129.00. This review made me feel even better about my purchase.Reply -
JarredWaltonGPU
I've added details on the temperatures of the drives during testing. This is worst-case write-heavy tests, so Iometer and DiskBench. Iometer wrote 2.95TB during our test sequence that lasts nine and a half minutes, while the larger Asus heatsink managed just over 3 TB of data written.Roland Of Gilead said:Eh, with the mentioning of heatsinks, it might have been good to include a temp graph!
Just what temps are the drives hitting when they are being tested?
For DiskBench, copying 300GB of data to the drive, the Crucial heatsink hit 51C while the Asus heatsink hit 38C. With the sustained write saturation testing, the Crucial heatsink peaked at 87C, which is the throttling point. Then it would slow down for a second (less than a second?) and the drive would stay in the 85~86C range. -
harleyspawn I would like to have seen a benchmark of this drive but connected to a PCIe 4.0 slot; just to get a good idea of how it would perform in a recent (but not bleeding-edge) motherboard. If it's got performance on-par with the leading PCIe 4.0 drives, then it may make sense to get this drive while waiting for the next must-have upgrade to the motherboard/CPU. If it's going to perform like a mid-tier PCIe 4.0 drive, then it makes sense to go with a top-tier PCIe 4.0 drive instead of this one if you're going to keep using something like an AMD 5000-series or Intel 11th or 12th gen CPU for a few more years.Reply -
JarredWaltonGPU
We could limit the PCIe slot to Gen4 speeds. But why? This drive costs over twice as much as a top-tier Gen4 drive of similar capacity. If you don't have a Gen5 slot, there's no reason to buy it. Latency isn't better, random QD1 performance isn't better, and power consumption is far higher. It's all about the raw bandwidth.harleyspawn said:I would like to have seen a benchmark of this drive but connected to a PCIe 4.0 slot; just to get a good idea of how it would perform in a recent (but not bleeding-edge) motherboard. If it's got performance on-par with the leading PCIe 4.0 drives, then it may make sense to get this drive while waiting for the next must-have upgrade to the motherboard/CPU. If it's going to perform like a mid-tier PCIe 4.0 drive, then it makes sense to go with a top-tier PCIe 4.0 drive instead of this one if you're going to keep using something like an AMD 5000-series or Intel 11th or 12th gen CPU for a few more years.
You'd be far better off buying a good Gen4 drive, and then if/when you upgrade your motherboard to something that supports PCIe 5.0 drives, you could probably buy a future Gen5 drive for the same price as the Gen4 drive, and still come out ahead. That's what I'd recommend doing.
If it were a case of spending maybe 20% more for the potential upgrade in the future, yes, that might be worth considering. But when we're looking at $340 for the 2TB model, and the Samsung 990 Pro 2TB costs half that, or the Solidigm P44 Pro 2TB goes for $130? It just doesn't make much sense without a Gen5 platform to run the SSD. We can only hope that the PCIe 5.0 price premium comes way down in the near future, because as fast as this drive is, it's not worth more than $200 in my book. -
Amdlova I use a pci4 ssd on pci 3 speed. And what I got? Pci 3 speeds but the highest temp with out a huge heat sink is 54°c. The motherboard works on 40°c or more. Have poor to none ventilation on the case. But these new pci5 it's too hot for most users. I want my fan cases spinning at 490 550 rpm little noise to none These ssds will fryReply -
Roland Of Gilead
Dang! They get hot! Will be active cooling on them in no time, if not already!JarredWaltonGPU said:I've added details on the temperatures of the drives during testing. This is worst-case write-heavy tests, so Iometer and DiskBench. Iometer wrote 2.95TB during our test sequence that lasts nine and a half minutes, while the larger Asus heatsink managed just over 3 TB of data written.
For DiskBench, copying 300GB of data to the drive, the Crucial heatsink hit 51C while the Asus heatsink hit 38C. With the sustained write saturation testing, the Crucial heatsink peaked at 87C, which is the throttling point. Then it would slow down for a second (less than a second?) and the drive would stay in the 85~86C range.
I get that these are temps at the higher end though. -
JarredWaltonGPU
Do note that the Inland TD510 has a tiny little fan to help cool it down. The Corsair MP700 originally was going to have a similar design, but ended up dropping the heatsink and fan option. (Probably because the fan sucked and wasn't a great experience. I have one of those original drives!) The new "solution" is that you just need a big heatsink on it.Roland Of Gilead said:Dang! They get hot! Will be active cooling on them in no time, if not already!
I get that these are temps at the higher end though. -
Sleepy_Hollowed This is not bad, I'd have a hard time buying this though since I don't see anywhere on their spec sheet power loss protection (crucial's higher end stuff used to have pretty decent protection).Reply
But if you don't need that it's up there for the ones needing the speed.
Their drives have been solid for me on both mobile and desktop, and they even used to (not sure if still do) offer a RAM caching system with their software to speed things up even more on some workloads, if you have enough RAM. -
g-unit1111 kiniku said:A very insightful review of this product and PCI 5.0 NVM-e SSDs relevance today. I just bought a Solidigm P44 2TB for $129.00. This review made me feel even better about my purchase.
Yeah I just bought the SK Hynix P41 Platinum for my new rig, and I'm glad I didn't decide to pay 3x the price for not a whole lot gained in SSD performance.