Fast reliable storage is the key to a successful system. You can sink all your money into processors, RAM, and graphics cards, but if your hard drive is slow, that bottleneck will slow down your entire system.
There are only a few hard drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD) manufacturers that I trust. And at the top of that short list is Crucial. I’ve been buying Crucial RAM and storage for a long time and I’ve never been disappointed.
That’s why I was eager to test the new Crucial T700 Pro Series NVMe Gen5, touted as “the fastest on the planet”.
Technical specifications of the Crucial T700 Pro Series
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Interface : PCIe Gen 5.0 x4, NVMe 2.0. -
Architecture : 232-layer NAND TLC. -
Ability : 1 TB, 2 TB and 4 TB. -
Speed (read/write, MB/s) : 1TB – 11700/9500 | 2TB & 4TB – 12,400/11,800. -
Hard drive endurance (TBW) : 1 TB – 600 TB | 2TB – 1200TB | 4TB – 2400TB. -
Cooling Cooling : versions with or without heat sink available. -
Guarantee : 5 year limited warranty. -
Price : from 203 € for the version without 1 TB heat sink to 711 € for the version with 4 TB heat sink.
You have two choices when buying a T700 Pro Series SSD: how much storage capacity do you need, and do you want the version with or without a heatsink?
If your motherboard has M.2 heatsinks (or you want to buy third-party heatsinks), the heatsinkless version will work. Otherwise, opt for the version with heatsink. I’ve tested both versions, and the heatsink variant does an absolutely amazing job of keeping the drive cool and running it at the highest possible speeds.
The heatsink of the T700 Pro Series is massive. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
But what about the claim that this drive is the “fastest Gen5 SSD on the planet”? It’s a bold statement.
Does the T700 Pro Series SSD measure up? In a word, yes!
I tested the 2GB versions of these drives, and in my benchmark tests using CrystalDiskMark, I was able to get read and write speeds that were within 10% of rated speed. This 10% might seem like a lot, but it’s more than acceptable in real-world testing.
This disc is extremely fast. Absolutely blistering in every sense of the word (except the heat!).
If you plan to use the heatsinkless version, you will need to provide your own heatsink. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
Combine speed with support for Microsoft’s DirectStorage technology, which helps games load faster by streamlining data access to disk, allowing the GPU to boost high-resolution textures up to 60 % faster with a 99% reduction in CPU usage, and this drive is the perfect choice for gamers looking to get more performance out of their hardware.
As for long-term reliability, only time will tell, but Crucial (and its parent company, Micron) have a fantastic track record in my experience, and there’s always the five-year limited warranty that we can refer if the worst should happen.
Source: “ZDNet.com”