Final Thoughts
As we come to the end here I am quite impressed with the Crucial T700. We’ve been talking about PCI-Express 5.0 storage for a while and we saw a few demos at CES back in January, but having the product in your hand and testing it yourself is what its all about! It is pretty crazy that we can have storage this fast in our systems! In our testing we saw read and write speeds of 12396.58 MB/s and 11713.10 MB/s in CrystalDiskMark. In ATTO Disk Benchmark was also observed speeds of 11.56 GB/s read and 10.96 GB/s. This makes the T700 the fastest solid state drive that we’ve ever tested!
With that being said in order to achieve these speeds you are going to need adequate cooling. Moving data this fast really heats up the drive. While Crucial does include a heatsink version, in our test scenario (test bench) we still found it to overheat and thermally throttle in some of our tests. If you are running the heatsink version or plain drive using your motherboard’s own M.2 heatsink you are going to want to make sure you have air running over the drive, or it will overheat. We observed this in both scenarios, but when we added a fan to the system blowing directly over the drive, it did not overheat.
The Phison E26 controller is going to be widely used in this first round of PCI-Express 5.0 drives. Overall I think Crucial’s implementation of this controller with their 232-layer Micron 3D TLC NAND is great. The 2TB version of the drive that we reviewed here today will be $339.99 (with heatsink $369.99). Overall ThinkComputers gives the Crucial T700 PCIe 5.0 Solid State Drive a 9 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Fastest drive we’ve ever tested
– Available in both heatsink and non-heatsink versions
– No loud fan on the heatsink version
– Available up to 4TB
Cons:
– Need air running over the drive or it will overheat
