Final Thoughts on the Crucial T710 Gen5 Solid State Drive
Having reviewed a handful of PCI-Express 5.0 drives the Crucial T710 has been the best experience so far. When PCI-Express 5.0 drives first came out one of the biggest issues was heat. With that many of the drives came with active-cooling fans, which were quite loud when you would do any sustained writes to the drive. Even with Crucial’s previous T705, which had a beefy heatsink we had thermal throttling issues, which we could only mitigate with putting a fan over the drive. Now this drive was based on Phison’s E26 controller, which was notorious for getting hot. With the T710 we have the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, which runs a lot cooler and we have no issues using this drive with the M.2 heatsink on our motherboard. As I mentioned previously Crucial does offer a heatsink version of the drive which uses a typical low-profile heatsink so temperatures are definitely in check.
Crucial has teamed the SM2508 controller with 276-layer 3D TLC NAND. This combination gives you very solid sustained performance. We did test this drive on our new SSD test rig, which is AMD based. In CrystalDiskMark we saw speed of 14490.92 MB/s read and 13409.66 MB/s, which is very impressive. Similarly in ATTO Disk Benchmark speeds were sustained at 12.54 GB/s read and 13.94 GB/s write. No thermal throttling issues at all during any of our tests. One of the more impressive tests was actually the AIDA64 linear write test, which writes the entire drive. Here we saw no drop in performance, which is something I haven’t seen in a long time!
When it comes to pricing the 2TB version that we took a look at today is currently selling at our favorite online retailer for $199.99, which I think is a great price. Another thing that is welcomed is that you can actually get a 4TB version, that will set you back $374.87. I really wish there was an 8TB version though! As of right now it looks like we have a new king of Gen5 drives! Overall ThinkComputers gives the Crucial T710 Gen5 Solid State Drive a 9 out of 10 score and our Editor’s Choice Award!
Pros:
– One of the fastest drives we’ve ever tested
– Great sustained write performance
– Good thermals
– Price
– DRAM cache
Cons:
– No 8TB version available
