With the motherboard heatsink installed, the T700 was hitting a temperature of 81 degrees Celsius under peak load when benchmarking. The P5 Plus ran cooler in comparison, hitting up to 70 degrees Celsius. Thermal throttling is a real concern with PCIe 5.0 SSDs, and the T700 started hitting its limits when pushed. The T700 is slated to be the first of a new set of faster PCIe 5.0 SSDs that offer even better performance than what we saw with the initial PCIe 5.0 SSD we covered in our Phison E26 SSD controller preview. The T700 uses the Phison E26 SSD controller, a robust design used in several other 5.0 SSDs, paired with speedy 232-Layer TLC flash, thus creating the fastest SSD we’ve ever tested in our labs. Impressively, it delivers this level of performance with passive cooling thanks to its well-designed heatsink, but if you remove the heatsink the SSD will also work well in motherboards with proper M.2 heatsink coverage. Based on internal gaming performance results measured with 3DMark® Storage Benchmark SSD performance test for gamers. Actual results may vary. There's also the question of how much DirectStorage could make faster SSDs useful in games. I suspect even if done properly, we're still looking at a current maximum of maybe 10-20GB of data for a game engine, level, and textures. So, you could potentially do 20GB in under two seconds with Gen5, versus three seconds with a fast Gen4, versus five seconds with a fast Gen3. But when I launch stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2 and it takes over a minute to get into the game, any of those sounds amazing! Some storage capacity is used for formatting and other purposes and is not available for data storage. 1GB equals 1 billion bytes.

The drive supports AES-256 encryption and TCG Opal 2.01, including for crypto erase (TCG OPAL was not implemented at the time of testing). Crucial also has other optimizations in the works, but the drives we're testing are considered Engineering Samples (ES), so the firmware is not final.Crucial expects that performance in random write workloads will improve in the future. Software and Accessories

The TBW (terabytes that may be written) rating for the T700 is 600TB per terabyte of capacity. If you weren’t aware, TBW is the mitigating factor in SSD warranties, (five years in this case), as miles are to the years in an automobile warranty. How does the Crucial T700 perform? Gamer Network Limited, Gateway House, 28 The Quadrant, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 1DN, United Kingdom, registered under company number 03882481. Note that the WD SN850X is a PCIe 4.0 drive included for comparison. It’s among the fastest 4.0 SSDs we’ve tested and was re-tested on our latest test bed. (See the “How we test” section at the end of this article.) 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. For our comparison charts, we pitted the Crucial drive against the Aorus 10000 and a slew of the fastest PCI Express 4.0 SSDs we've tried. Unfortunately, most actual read/write tasks your SSD performs are not dealing with neat, sequentially stored data. And in the tougher, more representative random read/write benchmarks, the picture of the T700 is more mixed: one of a drive that not only struggles to significantly outpace last-gen SSDs, but is sometimes slightly slower than them.

Pci 5 only will be good for server. For desktop for now only heat and compatible issues. Maybe two years beyond to be slim and the software can use that speed.There are no heat nor compatibility issues as long as you are using a PCIe 5 M.2 mobo. Don't be fooled by the elephant sized heatsinks that some companies are supplying with Gen 5 SSDs. In most if not all cases the mobo supplied SSD heatsink/cover plate is more than enough cooling to prevent throttling. The large heatsinks are a marketing ploy. As to the optional heatsink, most users will be fine without it, but if you’re going to pound on the drive in a system with lots of other heat-producing components, it couldn’t hurt. Pci 5 only will be good for server. For desktop for now only heat and compatible issues. Maybe two years beyond to be slim and the software can use that speed.ATTO Disk Benchmark showcases data transfer performance by reading and writing data in chunks of increasing sizes from 512 bytes to 64 MB. In ATTO, the T700 performed well, too, but there were instances where the P5 Plus outperformed it. Specifically, the 512B and 1KB write tests. In repeated tests, I found the T700 lagging behind in some of the smaller data size write tests. The T700 shaved a full 40 seconds off the Gigabyte PCIe 5’s 450GB write time. That’s bookin’. Shorter bars are better. The T700 is an excellent demonstration of what this generation of computing is capable of. If you have a new-generation system or are planning on building one, the T700 is worth considering, especially if you want the best hardware. You’re going to get cutting-edge performance, and even in the worst-case scenario, with a heatsink on, you’ll likely get performance that matches any PCIe 4.0 SSD. Under typical conditions for airflow and ambient temperature, our pre-installed premium heatsink allows the T700 Gen5 SSD to run at max workload without the need to thermal throttle. Please ensure your drive has proper airflow for maximum performance.