[Hardware] Crucial T700 preview: The fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD on the planet... for what that's worth

[Arben]

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• have the future in my hands. Well, in the PC Gamer test rig anyways. Yes, the lightning speed promise of PCIe 5.0 SSDs is fulfilled by a Crucial T700 drive that finally uses the 'good NAND,' with performance two-thirds quicker than any previous SSD we've tested. And that's just from an engineering sample which isn't yet fully validated or optimised.

  So, it could potentially go even quicker when release samples arrive.

  Our PC platforms have been ready for the inevitable rise of PCIe 5.0 SSDs since AMD launched its AM5 motherboards and Zen 4 CPUs last year, and yet we've been waiting all that time to see any solid state drive manufacturer actually take advantage of it. There's been no SSD launched to utilise the extra theoretical bandwidth afforded by the new interface.

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  That's an effective doubling of the bandwidth provided by the PCIe 4.0 interface, and means that the potential performance of these new Gen5 SSDs in a traditional x4 M.2 socket goes from 8 GB/s up to 16GB/s. 

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  So, why is it April 2023 and we're still yet to see a proper PCIe 5.0 SSD released? It's all about the memory and that so-called 'good NAND'.

  We've been chatting with manufacturers since PCs had PCIe 5.0 slots available and the noises were not that promising. The first drives that were announced, and indeed shown off in benchmarks, where the SSDs were capable of hitting 10,000 MB/s for read speeds. But that never looked like much of a performance bump over the ~8,000 MB/s Gen4 drives.

  We were told it wasn't a controller issue—where the Phison PS5026-E26 is seemingly ubiquitous across announced Gen5 SSDs—and that it's all down to the availability of NAND flash memory capable of taking advantage of the bandwidth on offer.

  The quickest flash memory available meant a limit of 10,000 MB/s. 

  Which is why we've been waiting on Micron to get its new 232-layer TLC NAND flash memory out the factory door and available for drive manufacturers to get into their own SSDs. The reason we've got a Crucial test drive is Micron is its parent company, and the T700 SSD represents a great vehicle for getting the performance of the group's new memory in front of consumers.

  Which is also why you'll see a bunch of previews going live today as a whole bunch of these engineering samples have been doing the rounds.

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  The Crucial T700 is rated for up to 12,400 MB/s sequential reads and 11,800 MB/s writes for the 2TB version that we've got our hands on. The 1TB version is actually fairly significantly slower, offering 11,700 MB/s and 9,500 MB/s for respective sequential reads and writes.

  The drive is supplied, as previously mentioned, with Micron's new 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory, which is that 'good NAND' everyone's been waiting on. Theoretically, on this controller, it could be tuned to even 14,000 MB/s.

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  The T700 is going to hit retail likely in May time, though we don't have a retail price for the unit as yet. But given the fact that the few PCIe 5.0 drives that have appeared in retail at the slower speeds, and have costed twice that of an equivalent high-end PCIe 4.0 SSD, the Crucial T700 is not going to be a cheap drive.

  It comes in two flavours—1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities notwithstanding—one that comes with a chonky metal heatsink and another that comes with just a thin copper label. It's long been known that PCIe 5.0 SSDs would come in hot, and initially I was pleased to see the T700 arrive not sporting a tiny whiny fan. 

  But it does need a heatsink, so that bare version is only designed for users that are going to seal it under a motherboard's own heatsink instead. Our test ASRock X670E Taichi board even has its own be-fanned extra Gen5-specific heatsink.

   

   

  

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  The good news is that in our preview testing the Crucial T700 does indeed hit its rated sequential performance. On the money, in fact, with our own numbers taken from the standard CrystalDiskMark benchmark being around 30-40 MB/s quicker.

  That's some 67% higher than the fastest Gen4 drive we've tested, the Samsung 990 Pro(opens in new tab) in 2TB trim. We've run our benchmarks against historic data from some of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs(opens in new tab) on the market today, and the numbers are fascinating. 

  That peak sequential read/write performance means the T700 is an outstanding drive if you're flinging large files and folders around your PC. In our real-world file transfer test—basically the act of copying a medium-sized Steam game folder—it's supremely quick. It took just 40 seconds to copy a 30GB folder from one part of the drive to another.

  The best PCIe 4.0 drives we've found take around 100 seconds longer. At best.

  The issue with that peak performance, however, is that it's purely within the interface. You're not going to get that performance copying into or out of a PCIe 5.0 SSD when you're crossing over to either a PCIe 4.0 drive or an external USB-based SSD.

  

• The good news is that in our preview testing the Crucial T700 does indeed hit its rated sequential performance. On the money, in fact, with our own numbers taken from the standard CrystalDiskMark benchmark being around 30-40 MB/s quicker.

  That's some 67% higher than the fastest Gen4 drive we've tested, the Samsung 990 Pro(opens in new tab) in 2TB trim. We've run our benchmarks against historic data from some of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs(opens in new tab) on the market today, and the numbers are fascinating. 

  That peak sequential read/write performance means the T700 is an outstanding drive if you're flinging large files and folders around your PC. In our real-world file transfer test—basically the act of copying a medium-sized Steam game folder—it's supremely quick. It took just 40 seconds to copy a 30GB folder from one part of the drive to another.

  The best PCIe 4.0 drives we've found take around 100 seconds longer. At best.

  The issue with that peak performance, however, is that it's purely within the interface. You're not going to get that performance copying into or out of a PCIe 5.0 SSD when you're crossing over to either a PCIe 4.0 drive or an external USB-based SSD.

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  https://www.pcgamer.com/crucial-t700-pcie-5-ssd-preview/