Faster desktop storage is finally here! Today we are taking a look at our first PCI-Express 5.0 or Gen5 solid state drive! PCI-Express 5.0 M.2 slots can be found in the latest motherboards on both the AMD and Intel side. With PCI-Express 4.0 storage we were able to achieve a max throughput of up to 7.877 GB/s and now with PCI-Express 5.0 that number is going up to a staggering 15.754 GB/s! Now not every Gen5 solid state drive will reach that speed. Today we are checking out the Crucial T700, which offers sequential read and write speeds of 12.4 GB/s and 11.8 GB/s respectively. The drive makes use of the new Phison E26 controller paired up with 232-layer Micron 3D TLC NAND. Crucial send us over both the heatsink and non-heatsink versions so we can test how the drive performs with standard motherboard M.2 heatsinks and their supplied heatsink.
Special thanks to Crucial for providing us with the T700 PCIe 5.0 Solid State Drive to review.
Features & Specifications
• Built with Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND1
• PCIe® 5.0 and NVMe™ 2.0
• M.2 2280, Double-Sided
• Available in premium fan-less heatsink and non-heatsink
• Nearly 2x faster than the fastest PCIe Gen4 SSDs6
• Sequential reads/writes up to 12,400/11,800MB/s2
• Random read/writes up to 1.5M IOPS
• Spacious capacity options: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB5
• Micron LPDDR4 DRAM, 1GB per 1TB of NAND flash
• Phison® PS5026-E26 Controller
• Microsoft DirectStorage optimized with Phison® I/O+ technology
• Works with PCIe 5.0 desktops and workstations
• Backward compatible with PCIe 3.0 and 4.0
• 5-year limited warranty7
Packaging
Our T700 drives come in pretty much identical packaging, although the heatsink version is a bit larger. On the front of the package it shows a picture of the drive and lets us know the capacity, speed, and that the drive comes with a 5-year warranty. As you can see we have the 2TB versions of the drive but it will be available in 1TB and 4TB versions as well.
Flipping over to the back some of main features are listed in a few different languages.
Opening the boxes up all you’ll find is the drives themselves as well as a small user’s guide.
