We are just getting used to PCIe Gen 4 SSDs and now PCIe Gen 5 have been trickling out onto the market. For that Crucial has changed up their usual naming which was all focused around their P lineup with the P5 Plus being their highest-end drive. For the new drive, however, they have changed things up to T700 to indicate the new Gen 5 drive. With the specs highlighting rear speeds of up to 12,400 MB/s and write speeds of 11,800 MB/s we are in for another huge performance increase over what we saw with PCIe Gen 4 and especially Gen 3. So today I’m going to dive in and check out the Crucial T700 Pro with and without its heatsink to see what is behind the curtain and then check out their performance including comparing what the cooling can do for you. So let’s dive in!

Product Name: Crucial T700 PCIe Gen5 NVMe M.2 SSD 2TB

Review Sample Provided by: Crucial

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

Photos and Features

Crucial’s new T700 is available in three different capacities (1TB, 2TB, and 4TB) and then each of those can be found with a heatsink and without a heatsink so they have a surprising number of SKUs for just launching one new model. They sent over both of the 2TB models so we can check it out with and without its heatsink. Because of the size difference in the drive with the heatsink and without the heatsink the packaging between the two are different sizes as well. But the front of the box has the same layout and styling and this is a new look for Crucial as well. They still use blue but now the blue is a much lighter color and is up on the top edge along with the older darker blue used as a stripe across the front where the model name is. The Crucial logo is still up in the top left corner and they now have the Pro Series badge in the top right indicating the model lineup this is from. Above the model name, they show that this is a PCIe Gen 5 NVMe M.2 SSD and the heatsink model does say “with premium heatsink” next to the model name as well. They both have a picture of the drive right on the front which I love. The front also shows off the drive capacity and its potential read speed with a sticker along the right edge. Then they both have the 5-year warranty highlighted in the bottom right corner. Around on the back, they mention a few features on each which are different between the heatsink and non-heatsink drives. Those are then just repeated across 7 other languages. The non-heatsink model also has a tiny window on the back where the serial can be scanned.

Once you get inside of the boxes, both models come with the generic Crucial SSD documentation which has all of the legal information needed inside. Even with the different sized drives and boxes they both come in a clear plastic clamshell which keeps the drive from moving around and is safe.

For styling both of the variations of the Crucial T700 have the blacked-out styling which a majority of drives have these days. That includes the flat black PCB and then for the non-heatsink model, it has a black sticker over the top. For the heatsink model, the heatsink itself has a textured black finish. All of the same information is across the top on both models, just in different locations because of the heatsink.

The heatsink version of the Crucial T700 has the standard 23mm width and 80 mm length but with the addition of the heatsink, it is 20.5 mm thick. This is a double-sided SSD and with the addition of the heatsink that wraps around to the back as well it does have a little more thickness on the underside than some drives. So keep that in mind when installing because you may have to remove the thermal pad on the underside of some motherboard installations for clearance. The heatsink is all aluminum and has a textured black finish. Up on top, they have the Crucial logo on the peak of the heatsink in white then the model name on the right side. The drive also has a sticker on the back, that is where you will find the drive size and your serial number. The view of the end of the heatsink helps give a better idea of what is going on as it has L-shaped fins, 7 in total with the middle being T shaped to give it as much surface area as possible. The heatsink is held together with two screws on each side. The side view also shows just how quickly the bottom portion of the heatsink collects fingerprints with enough of my fingerprints on it to get a full CSI profile.

The non-heatsink version of the Crucial T700 is the same drive at its core, only without the heatsink. This is designed to be installed in motherboards with built-in heatsinks. PCIe 4.0 and especially 5.0 drives benefit a lot from cooling and in some cases can’t run without a heatsink. But a lot of the motherboards on the market these days already have integrated M.2 heatsinks that cover half of the board, taking those off to run an SSD with its own heatsink wouldn’t look good and in some cases wouldn’t fit at all with some having the M.2 mounted upside down or the drive sitting under the video card. The styling is the same though with the black PCB being more visible here and then on top, there is a black branding sticker. Where the heatsink had everything printed in white this has a reflective finish that blends in a little more but it does still have the Crucial logo on the left and the T700 model name and PCIe Gen 4 drive information on the right, only here they are down closer to the bottom edge. The back of the drive then has the information stickers with all of the required certification logos, the model number and serial number as well as the capacity of the drive which is in the biggest font and is easy to see in the top right corner.

Both the heatsink and non-heatsink models are the same base drive so I decided to get a look at the heatsink drive so we could see how Crucial was handling thermal transfer between the heatsink and drive. They have blue thermal putty with a dot on each of the main components top and bottom as well as dabs over the power circuitry as well. For the layout on the M.2 connection side up on top the T700 has the Phison PS5026-E26 Controller which is silver. Next to that is the Micron LPDDR4 DRAM which has 2MB77 and D8CJG on top as well as the Micron logo, for the 1TB that we have here this is 2GB of dram. Then towards the end, the top side has two NAND chips. These are Micron 232-layer TLC NAND with 3FC2D NY181 etched on top. A look at the back of the drive has two more of the same NAND on the back side of the drive as well, interestingly you can see that there is a spot for a second DRAM chip for the 2TB model that is unused but they did still put the thermal paste on that spot which should help pull from the back of the PCB as well. The back of the controller on the other hand didn’t have any additional paste which is a bummer because that is normally where most of the heat will be. The four NAND chips tell us that our 2TB capacity drive has 512 GB per NAND but the larger 4TB model does increase that to meet its capacity up to 1TB per NAND. If for some reason you end up with the heatsinked T700 but have to install it in a motherboard where a heatsink isn’t supported you can remove it, but you will need a small Torx 5 driver to do it.

Test Rig and Procedures

Performance

Before getting into testing the Crucial T700 PCIe Gen5 NVMe M.2 SSD 2TB I did check the drive out using CrystalDiskInfo just to confirm that it was connected using the correct interface. It was connected at PCIe 5.0 x4 so we are good there. I also like to do this to document the firmware revision we are running on for testing because those do change from time to time as well.

My first round of testing was to run the Crucial T700 through Crystal Disk Mark 8. Sequential testing is usually a best-case scenario and is what companies use for their specifications and on the front of the box to advertise drive speeds which in the case of the T700 the box and the specifications both touch up speeds of up to 12400 MB/s which is insane compared to any of the PCIe 4.0 drives that I have tested in the past. For the sequential tests, the T700 lived up to that mark almost perfectly with the read speed coming in at 12399.57, less than half of a MB/s less than listed. For the write speed, the specifications list it at up to 11800 MB/s and the T700 came in at 11692.96, a little lower but still not too far off. More importantly, both are almost double what any other drive has performed. Looking at some of the other results, however, the random 4K results aren’t any faster than PCIe 4.0 and even 3.0 drives have done. We have seen the same thing with the 4.0 drives as well which when it comes to raw bandwidth the faster interface helps but it isn’t the limitation in some other tests.

While testing in CrystalDiskMark 8 I did also check out the drive’s IOPS performance with the random 4k queue depth of 32 and 1 thread results. I stacked the read and write performance together here because I do believe that the overall drive performance is important, not just one result or the other. The Crucial T700 doesn’t look as hot with these IOPS scores which when put together have it down second from the bottom.

In AS SSD, I skipped over the standard test because it is very similar to the CrystalDiskMark tests I prefer to check out one of its sub-tests, the copy benchmark. This moves three files, one that is an ISO, one that is a program, and then a game, and times how long each takes. With these being timed, lower is better here. I have all three results stacked to see which drives are best overall. The Crucial T700 dominated in all three of the copy benchmarks with the lowest time on each of them by a big margin, nearly half the time for the ISO test for example. This put it in a class of its own.

Next up with PassMark Performance Test 10, I ran their combined synthetic benchmark to get a look at their DiskMark rating. The Crucial T700 didn’t top the chart here but is still up in the top few with it sitting behind the older Crucial P5 Plus. The read and write sequential tests that Passmark uses helped the T700 but the IOPS tests counteracted that keeping the T700 from being at the top.

I then changed my focus back over to IOPS performance and ran the T700 in Anvil’s Storage Benchmark focusing on the 4k queue depth of 16 results from the main test. The read IOPS for the Crucial T700 were great with them sitting right in the middle with a few other fast rear IOPS results. But the write IOPS were the second lowest of all of the drives tested. When combined it put the T700 down in the bottom 1/3 of the chart and in with a few of the PCIe 3.0 drives.

Sticking with Anvil’s Storage Utilities I did a few more tests. Here I wanted to check out how the drive would react to different queue depths so with the file size set to 4K I ran tests ramping up double each time starting at 1 and up to 128 for reads and 64 for writes. This lets us see if the controller gets overloaded. For the read queue depth tests the T700 starts off ahead of everything else tested with its 91 MB/s result in the single queue depth test. It stays ahead initially but by a queue depth of 8 a few drives pass it. It takes the lead again at a queue depth of 32 and along with the NM800, it stays at the top and way out ahead of the other drives in the high queue depth tests. For the write test, the T700 isn’t the fastest drive at a queue depth of 1 but it isn’t far behind first with just two drives being faster. The T700 drops into the middle of the pack as the queue depth goes up and at the 16 queue depth test, its performance drops even farther down. It does start to rise back up from there but only ends up in the middle of the pack in the end. In short, the read queue depth testing went well, not so much for the write queue depth results, however.  

For ATTO Benchmark I set it to a queue depth of just 1 but ramped up the file size slowly to see how it would affect performance. For the read test in ATTO, the Crucial T700 jumps out ahead of the other drives and the gap widens up until the drive hiccups at the 1MB test, but it recovers and even at that hiccup it still stays out in front of the competition, but more impressive is the gap between it and the other drives with it reaching nearly 10000 MB/s at its peak. The write test on the other hand doesn’t have the hiccup and performs even better getting right below 10000 MB/s and staying there the whole time.

Next up I wanted to look at more real-world performance and for this, I started with PCMark 10 which has an overall full system benchmark for storage, and then one focused on data storage drives. In the full system drive benchmark, the Crucial T700 is way out in front of the other drives tested with its score of 5151 with the next closest drive, the Fury Renegade 2010 points behind at 3141. The data drive benchmark on the other hand has the T700 so far out in front of the rest of the drives that it messes up the scale of the graph being almost twice as high of a score as the other drives.

Next, up for more real-world resting, I did our file transfer tests. You don’t get any more real-world than this. For each drive, I copied the folder filled with files to the drive tested documenting what its transfer rate is near the end of the transfer. I used three file types, movies which are large single files, a folder filled with RAW and JPG photos, and then a folder filled with Word documents. Starting with the movie files the T700 was the second fastest drive tested, given the crazy bandwidth we saw in the sequential Crystaldiskmark benchmark I was expecting it to be faster here, it may be limited by the overall test setup in that specific case. With the photo file transfer coming in well ahead of the rest of the other drives, I’m inclined to think that the movie test was limited by outside factors. The last test using Word documents on the other hand, because of their small size, isn’t sequential and does expose the T700’s lower IOPS performance. At 4.57 MB/s this was still better than some of the drives tested, but the T700 wasn’t the fastest option for that file type. Overall for mid to larger files, the real-world file transfer speeds are going to be great but just know that if you are mostly going to be moving smaller files it might not be the best drive for you. Even from Crucial the Crucial P3 and P3 Plus were both faster in that situation.

Normally with our thermal testing, I check out the temperatures when under load and have thermal images to see where the hotspots are. PCIe 4.0 drives have sometimes struggled without cooling which is why you see some with their own heatsinks. I wanted to see how the T700 with its new 5.0 interface would handle things so I went a little beyond the thermal images this time around. This was helped a lot by Crucial sending both their heatsink model and the base SSD as well. I put together a few different temperatures using both SSDs and when putting them under load I used AIDA64’s disk benchmark’s linear read test to heat things up. Our test bench typically uses airflow from the GPU and the AIO on the back but doesn’t have a fan blowing directly into the top M.2 area which is really tight once you have a video card installed. So some of our testing played around with having a fan or not having a fan. What I found was that at idle the heatsink model with zero airflow ran cool, but once under load a little airflow is still needed. But without the heatsink at all it was hot right from the start and ran even hotter without airflow. Getting a fan on the bare drive helped it run cooler, but using the motherboard's heatsink or the stock T700 heatsink was better. In short, though you are going to want to make sure you have a little airflow on ANY of these options.

The thermal images show the same thing, both the stock heatsink and the heatsink from our motherboard keep things cool with a little airflow their way. But you can see the heat down at the PCB. Most motherboards pack their PCIe 5.0 slot right up near the CPU to keep that distance short, but the downside is that it also means your GPU which creates a lot of heat is going to be right up against things and the GPU itself can blow airflow.

To see what kind of difference cooling can make on the T700 I did see some throttling in my testing with the ATTO benchmark. You can see the performance dropoff in both the ATTO read and write tests even with the heatsink when I didn’t have airflow around the SSD. Doing the same test with airflow the write test has no dropoff and the read does but it bounces right back.

Overall and Final Verdict

With the Crucial T700 being our first PCIe 5.0 drive to come into the office, I’ve been really excited to see what the new drives are capable of and the T700 does offer insane raw performance when it comes to sequential file tests. The same goes for our real-world file transfer tests where the T700 has shown the limitations of the test setup, writing faster than our base SSD can read. The same goes for its performance in PC Mark 10 which is also real-world focused with its mix of real-world tests, the T700 completely broke the scaling of our results compared to everything else tested. But like with the PCIe 4.0 drives the sequential performance doesn’t always translate to great performance in all situations and we saw that in some of the IOPS tests, especially write IOPS it struggled and would fall into the middle of the pack or in a few cases down at the bottom of the charts.  There were issues with write performance when the queue depths were cranked up. Those two issues together also hurt the real-world performance when it came to small files.

Another thing that is very clear is that with the T700 and all of the PCIe 4.0 and higher drives you really have to stay on top of their cooling. Crucial offers the heatsink version of the T700 in all three of their drive sizes but you also have the option to get the SD without the heatsink if you have a motherboard which already has integrated M.2 cooling. Either way though, in my testing I found that more important than anything else is having at least some airflow. M.2 drives, especially when you are using the priority PCIe 5.0 slot like the T700 needs get stuck right up against your video card which puts out heat and also blocks airflow. A low speed fan putting even a little airflow near our drive nomatter the heatsink helped a lot. It also showed in the performance in some tests. It would be crazy to buy a crazy fast SSD only to let it run slow because you didn’t keep it cool enough.

As for pricing I have a full breakdown of the T700 pricing above. The 2TB drives that I tested today will run you $339.99 for the base drive and $30 more for the model with the heatsink at $369.99. This is the latest and greatest and you do pay for it. Crucial’s pricing isn’t far off from the competition with just two 2TB 5.0 drives on Newegg as of me writing this. The MSI M570 is $349.99 and there is a second drive that won’t be out for another week at $259.99, both with heatsinks. The Microcenter Inland TD510 on the other hand is looking like a big value with it already having sale pricing of $249.99. For the Crucial T700, having the non-heatsink model is big here giving a cheaper option for those who already have expensive motherboards with a nice M.2 cooler on their PCIe 5.0 slot. I’m also exited to see Crucial not standing back and waiting, in the past some of their drives have been a little slower to market when it comes to the higher end models. Even without the Ballistix branding they are on top of things with the T700.

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.