The Crucial T700 (starts at $179.99 for 1TB; $369.99 for 2TB with heatsink as tested) is the second solid-state drive (SSD) using the new PCI Express 5.0 bus that we've tested, and it's easily the fastest. In benchmarks, the Editors' Choice-winning T700 effectively matches its blistering throughput ratings, edging past the Gigabyte Aorus 10000 in raw speed if only by narrow margins. The catch? As with all PCIe 5.0 drives, if your desktop PC is more than a few years old, you'll likely need to build a whole new system from scratch to fulfill the T700's performance potential.
The Design: Cheetah-Fast Throughput
The T700 is a four-lane solid-state drive running the NVMe 2.0 protocol over a PCI Express 5.0 bus. This two-sided internal SSD comes in the standard M.2 Type-2280 "gumstick" format. The drive uses Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND chips and Phison's new Gen 5-optimized PS5026-E26 controller. (Stymied by some of these terms? Check out our handy guide to SSD jargon.)
Available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, the T700 can be bought with or without a heatsink. If you buy it without, you'll need to use the heatsink included with your motherboard or some other heavy-duty cooling solution. As mentioned, to fully support Crucial's new flagship or a similar PCIe 5.0 SSD, you must either buy one of the few Gen 5-compatible boutique desktops or build your own with a brand-new CPU and motherboard. Yes, the T700 is backward-compatible with PCI Express versions 4.0 and even 3.0, but will revert to the maximum throughput of those older interfaces, which defeats the purpose (and expense) of buying a Gen 5 drive in the first place.
The 2TB version we tested and the 4TB drive are both rated for a sequential read speed up to 12,400MBps and sequential write speed up to 11,800MBps; the 1TB drive is rated for up to 11,700MBps read and 9,500MBps write. The 2TB Aorus 10000's rated peak speeds are lower than the Crucial drive's at 10,000MBps read and 9,500MBps write.
By contrast, the T700's durability rating (expressed in terms of lifetime write capacity in total terabytes written or TBW) is slightly below the Aorus 10000's for the capacities they have in common (700TBW for the 1TB Aorus drive and 1,400TBW for 2TB). That puts the Crucial in line with most PCIe 4.0 speedsters. The WD Black SN850X, for instance, is rated at 600TBW and 1,200TBW for 1TB and 2TB respectively. A few PCI Express 4.0 drives offer substantially higher durability ratings; the MSI Spatium M470, for example, is rated at 1,600TBW for 1TB and 3,300TBW for 2TB. At the other extreme, the Mushkin Delta, which uses less durable QLC memory, is rated at just 200TBW for 1TB, 400TBW for 2TB, and 800TBW for 4TB.
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 device supports AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption, the gold standard in drive security.
A Choice of Heatsink Strategies
An unwanted byproduct of the prodigious speed of PCIe 5.0 solid-state drives is the abundant heat they generate, which necessitates an effective cooling solution. As we said, you can buy the Crucial T700 without a heatsink or spend $30 more for the company's custom-designed heatsink, a passive (fanless) finned array in aluminum and nickel-plated copper. Although it's larger than many heatsinks that ship with PCI Express 4.0 SSDs, it's much more compact than the conspicuously tall (1.75-inch) heatsink supplied with the Gigabyte Aorus 10000. Heatsink size could prove an issue with Gen 5 SSDs in general, as the drive with heatsink attached must be able to fit in the motherboard's PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot.
If you opt to save $30 and skip Crucial's own heatsink, you'll be using the drive with the motherboard's own heatsink, which in the case of our testbed (detailed below) is a fan-based unit that proved about as effective (based on our benchmark results) as Crucial's kit. Presumably other motherboard manufacturers also provide heatsinks up to the task of cooling the drives used in their Gen 5 slots, but you'll have to do your own research to be sure.
Gen 5 Hardware: Beyond the SSD
As mentioned, the latest generation of NVMe SSDs promises a major speed boost, but you'll only be able to enjoy it if your hardware is new enough to support the PCIe 5.0 standard. Only the latest high-end desktops are likely to support PCI Express 5.0 off the shelf, so you may have to build your own PC from scratch or perform a major update on an existing desktop. Intel users will need a 12th or 13th Generation Core CPU with a motherboard based on Intel's Z690 or Z790 chipset. AMD fans must have a Ryzen 7000 series processor with an AM5 motherboard with an X670, X670E, or B650E chipset.
We benchmarked the Crucial T700 on our latest testbed, designed specifically for testing PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives. It consists of an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard with an AMD X670 chipset, 32GB of DDR5 memory (two Crucial 16GB DIMMs), one PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slot (with lanes that have direct access to the CPU), and three PCIe 4.0 slots. The processor is an AMD Ryzen 9 7900 using an AMD stock cooler; the GPU is an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super card with 8GB of GDDR6 memory; and the power supply is a 750-watt Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 Snow unit. The boot drive is an ADATA Legend 850 PCIe 4.0 SSD. All this is housed in a Praxis Wetbench open-frame case.
Testing the Crucial T700: Seriously Fast
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.
We have now had the opportunity to test three different 2TB versions of the Crucial T700: the preproduction engineering sample that I wrote about in April and two 2TB retail versions, one with Crucial's heatsink and one without, which we tested using the motherboard's heatsink. The engineering sample—which came before the TCG OPAL encryption/decryption function and certain power-saving features were activated—had faster read speeds than the two final-version T700s. That's not surprising, because both security and power-saving features can cause a hit in speed.
Otherwise, the drives' benchmark scores were very similar (in nearly all cases less than 1% apart), and using Crucial's heatsink versus the fan-based motherboard heatsink made no effective difference in performance. The results charted below are for the production version of the drive with the Crucial heatsink.
In Crystal DiskMark sequential speed testing, the T700 effectively matched its rated speeds, landing less than a percent below its 12,400MBps rated read speed and exceeding its 11,800MBps rated write speed by an even smaller margin. That makes it substantially faster in both read and write than the Aorus 10000. Its Crystal DiskMark 4K (small-file) results were more sedate, with its 4K read speed falling below the average of the PCIe 4.0 drives, as was also true with the Aorus. In 4K write testing, the two Gen 5 SSDs were at the top of the pack, with the Gigabyte a smidge faster than the Crucial.
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.
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.
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.
Verdict: The Best Gen 5 SSD So Far
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.
We know even faster Gen 5 drives, with read-speed ratings up to 14,000MBps (the theoretical maximum for the interface), are on the way. But there's always some bigger, better, or faster tech on the horizon. All we can test and evaluate is the hardware we have today, and on that basis the T700 earns our Editors' Choice award as a high-performance internal SSD, our first for a Gen 5 model.
