Tested: Crucial’s New T700 Is the Fastest PCI Express 5.0 SSD Yet

Hold on to your bits: A new internal-SSD speed champ has just blown into town—though you may have to wait a while to get your hands on one. Even as we were testing the Aorus 10000 Gen5 SSD, our first encounter with the hyper-fast PCI Express 5.0 bus applied to SSDs, we received an engineering sample (pre-production unit) of storage giant Micron’s Crucial T700, the company’s first PCIe 5.0 drive. (According to Micron, the finished product should be available by the end of May.)

This early sample has a few bits of unfinished business. According to Micron, the drive still has to clear some regulatory hurdles; the TCG OPAL(Opens in a new window) functionality isn’t yet activated; and both random writes and power consumption are due for some optimizations. So we’re not doing a formal review here, or assigning it a formal Editors’ Rating quite yet; that will come when we get our hands on a retail-level sample of the drive.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

But in the meantime, a performance preview: We put the T700 through its paces, and it performed as we’d expected based on its rated speeds, breezing past the Aorus 10000 Gen5 to post the highest sequential read and write scores we’ve ever seen from a single internal drive, and outpacing the Aorus—generally by a small margin—on nearly every other test we ran.

Warp Speed Ahead

The T700 is a a four-lane drive running the NVMe 2.0 protocol over a PCIe 5.0 bus. It is a two-sided M.2 Type-2280 SSD in “gumstick” format. The T700 uses Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND chips and Phison’s new E26 controller. It will come in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities.

The 2TB model (which we tested) and the 4TB model are both rated at 12,400MBps maximum sequential read speed and 11,800MBps sequential write speed, with the 1TB T700 rated at 11,700MBps read and 9,500MBps write, max. The 2TB Aorus 10000 is rated at lower peak speeds than the T700: 10,000MBps read and 9,500MBps write.

The Crucial T700 with its heatsink (top) and without.
(Credit: Molly Flores)

With those spectacular rated speeds comes a large amount of heat, so to keep the T700 cool, Micron employs a finned aluminum heatsink. At a glance, it may look enormous, but it’s positively petite compared with the Aorus 10000’s double-decker heatsink, which is more than twice as tall. Look at it end-on, though, and you’ll see the multiple fins emanating from the base; there’s a good bit of cooling surface area here compressed into a low-clearance heatsink, which is more than can be said for the Aorus’ arching-overhead passive cooler.

Testing the Crucial T700 Engineering Sample: Out-of-Sight Fast

We benchmarked the Crucial T700 pre-production unit on our new testbed, designed specifically for testing PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs. 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. It sports an AMD Ryzen 9 7900 CPU using an AMD stock cooler, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super card with 8GB of GDDR6 SDRAM, and it is powered by a Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 Snow 750W PSU. The boot drive is an ADATA Legend 850 PCIe 4.0 SSD. All this is housed in a Praxis Wetbench open-frame case.

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. In the benchmarks below, we compare the T700’s performance with the Aorus 10000, as well as a gaggle of the fastest PCI Express 4.0 SSDs we have tested.

In Crystal DiskMark sequential speed testing, while the T700 hit its rated write speed almost on the dot, it blew past its rated read speed to fall just under the 13,000MBps level. This is fully 3,000MBps faster than even the Aorus! Its Crystal DiskMark 4K results were more sedate, with its 4K read speed falling below the average of the PCIe 4.0 comparison drives, as was also true with the Aorus. In 4K write testing, the T700 effectively matched the Aorus at the top of the pack.

The PCMark 10 Overall Storage test measures a drive’s speed in performing a variety of routine tasks such as launching Windows, loading games and creative applications, and copying both small and large files. The Crucial T700 edged the Aorus 10000 with a new (if unofficial; it is, after all, a pre-production unit) high score, handily beating out 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. Here the P700 consistently beat out the Aorus, mostly by narrow margins. As was the case with the Aorus, it shone on the File Copy test, posting a score that was nearly 60% faster than the nearest PCIe 4.0 SSD. In 3DMark Storage, an aggregate test that measures a drive’s prowess at a number of gaming-related tasks, it topped the Aorus as well as all the PCIe 4.0 drives.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The Fastest SSD (So Far)

The test results above for the Crucial T700 are strictly unofficial, as we have not yet tested the final production version, but we don’t expect the results from the finished product to be substantially different than what you see here. Suffice it to say that the T700 is blazingly fast, and topped even the Aorus on nearly all of our benchmarks.

We hope the T700 enjoys its day in the sun, because even faster Gen 5 drives are in the works, expected to be rated at PCI Express 5.0’s maximum theoretical read speed of 14,000MBps. As baseball great Satchel Paige once said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”