Crucial - T700 2TB Internal SSD PCIe Gen 5x4 NVMe with Heatsink

This 2TB Crucial T700 NVMe Gen5 SSD is currently installed in my gaming tower as secondary storage, but after testing it out, I might just clone and swap it with my primary drive for the performance improvements it offers. This model is designed for desktop systems as it comes with a fairly chunky aluminum and nickel-plated copper passive heatsink attached and measures ¾” thick. You would not be able to install it in a laptop or low clearance system. There is, however, a non-heatsink version of this drive available, though Crucial recommends using it with an alternate heatsink anyway for optimal performance, as it is prone to overheating quickly without one. The chipset used is an 8-channel Phison PS5026-E26 controller with a Micron 232-Layer 3D TLC NAND Flash memory and 1GB LPDDR4 DRAM cache per 1TB of capacity. While motherboards that support Gen5 PCIe are not yet ubiquitous, the SSD is backwards compatible and will operate just fine in a PCIe Gen4 slot, and this was what I have available on my motherboard. Having a Gen5 drive gives me a little bit of future-proofing if I decide to upgrade the motherboard, though currently, I'm not able to take advantage of the fastest read and write speeds the drive offers. To achieve the T700’s fullest potential, you will also need a current generation CPU e.g. Intel's 12th/13th Gen or AMD AM5. My system is using a Intel Core i7-13700KF. Installation was straightforward; the drive fits into an m-key m.2 slot at a slight upward angle and is then secured with a single screw to the 2280 form-factor terminal (screw not included). It needs to be initialized before you can use it, and I did this by partitioning and formatting it using Windows Disk Management. When benchmarking the drive with Crystal Disk Mark, the Crucial T700 was able to achieve Read/Write speeds of 7100 MB/s read and 6823 MB/s write respectively, but keep in mind it is installed in a Gen 4 slot. However, this is still a marked improvement from my primary SDD’s performance (a Gen4x4 NVMe) of 4650 MB/s read and 3600 MB/s write. I was able to copy over large quantities of data (~50GB folder) to the drive in under 30 seconds with an average write speed of 2.7GB/s. Typical operating temps when idle are around 38-45°C and when under heavy loads were around 60°C. The drive works with Microsoft DirectStorage and GPU decompression to enable faster asset loading with less CPU utilization when rendering hi-res 3D textures, which is useful for both gaming and content creation applications. This functionality kicks in automatically as long as you have compatible hardware and a DirectX 12 application/game designed to use this storage acceleration feature. Overall, this drive performs great with fast read/write speeds while staying relatively cool thanks to the included heatsink. I didn’t experience thermal throttling on my system, though at maximum performance in a Gen 5 slot, you may have different results depending on how hard you push the drive. It was a very simple DIY upgrade for my gaming rig.

Crucial - T700 2TB Internal SSD PCIe Gen 5x4 NVMe with Heatsink The T700 is the new performance PCIe 5.0 NVMe drive for computers with this type of slot. It uses a Phison E26 Controller and Micron Flash. This particular module has a interesting heat sink ( see picture) that in the right environment should keep things cool. I had no problems with overheating but for the cost differential over the bare module I would have preferred a heat pipe solution. The t700 is capable of 12,400MBps/11,800Bps for sequential reads and writes and 1,500million IOPS for both random reads and writes. What his means is that it is fast … approximately 2 times faster on average than the PCIe 4.0 NVMe (and a major leap from older PCIe 3.0 drives) that I was using which is now my second drive. The 2TB gives you plenty of space for the OS and most other things. Like previous Crucial drives the T700 includes The Crucial Storage Executive which has such features as drive information, SMART attributes, firmware updates, secure erase/sanitize, overprovisioning, and other features related to encryption. There is also a rebranded version of the Acronis True image for cloning and backup purposes. I have always used Crucial for memory upgrades and for some SSDs. They have always been reliable. After optimizing the drive the system booted almost instantly and things just felt faster. Games and graphic rendering was noticeably faster that it was before. Even during long operations such as copying 100GB of data back and for the drive did not throttle down. This drive does require a thermal solution so don’t think about installing this in a laptop and most game consoles don’t have the room for the heatsink requirement.

I have a gaming PC that's pretty good however I'm in the process of building a new one. I currently have a Core i9-10850K with RTX3090 with 64GB DDR4 RAM. I've spec'd out a new build with a i9-13900K and RTX4090. With the new update in specs, I figured a newer, state of the art, HD is also in order. This little unit came up and thought it would be the perfect fit for my new rig. Sadly, I'm still waiting on my GPU however I was able to plop this into my current rig for testing/formatting. Biggest thing you'll need to consider is the size of this since it does come with a heatsink. The current motherboard I have now barely fit this thing, almost to the point where I thought I would break it trying to get it in/out. Still reviewing what MB I'll be getting for my new rig however this is an important piece I thought I'd let everyone know. There is a version without the heatsink however I figured the added heat dissipation would outweigh the logistical issues it may present. After setup, this drive works wonderfully. Speed is super nice even with my, somewhat, older MB. I had the rig on for several hours and did notice some odd peaks in heat with this so that is something I'm monitoring. I'm sure (hoping) with the new MB I get that this won't be an issue but we'll see.

My gaming tower originally came with just a 512gb SSD and a 1TB spinning drive. Since then, I have added another 1TB SSD but I really don't like using the spinning drive so I was looking to add some more space to hold all my games. In walks the Crucial T700 2TB PCIe NVMe SSD! What I ended up doing is moving all the games off of the 1TB SSD to the spinning drive and then flashing the operating system over to the now empty 1TB SSD. I pulled the 512GB drive and put the new 'system drive' in its place. Now you may ask why I didn't use the 2TB drive in the main M.2 slot, and that would be because that slot is crammed between the CPU w/liquid cooler, and the top of the video card. Since the T700 comes with it's own heatsink, I didn't want to waste that in such a cramped area with not great airflow. I then installed the Crucial T700 in the secondary M.2 slot at the bottom of the motherboard and right in the path of the fans from both the video card and the PC. Both M.2 slots are unfortunately only Gen 4x4, so I am not getting the max speed I could get from either of the SSDs but no one is going to see the 12400 MB/s that is claimed on the box of this thing any time in the near future. But that is OK, the capacity of this drive is big enough that I will be using it in my next tower as well. I then moved over the game files from the spinning drive and then pulled it from the tower. I fired everything up again, with everything in place and I now have 3TB of high speed and super high speed drives available. Everything runs well and I have not had a single hiccup in the week that it has been installed and running. While I wish I could say that I could tell that everything was running a lot faster, I don't think any of my games quite task my system enough yet to see that. I have posted the benchmarks for both my 1TB and the Crucial T700 2TB drives. I'm definitely going to make sure that the motherboard in my next tower has Gen 5x4 slots so I can see this drive REALLY show its power. As it is, it is a great drive, with a large capacity, and room to continue to stretch its legs in a more powerful system. It's isn't cheap but when has getting the best components for your PC been cheap?

Great Nvme drive, it's plain and simple, the fastest SSD money can buy. You just got to be sure your PC supports it. Only the new AM5 platform on AMD (and you have to make sure your motherboard has the interface, as not all motherboard's have it) and 12th and 13th Gen on Intel support them. Luckily I just upgraded to a new AMD AM5 motherboard with a x670e chipset and my motherboard has one Nvme port that supports it (out of 3, only one is Pcie 5). The drive is tiny compact and comes with a beefy heatsink (these drives really need them, they can get very toasty compared to previous gens, and if you don't keep them cool, they start throttling down to self preserve and performance goes down). Compared to previous Gen 4 drives that had normal operating temp of around 30 C to 40 C under idle conditions, I have noticed this guy start at around 50 C to 60 C at idle. It can get very toasty around 70 C to 80 under load, even with the heatsink, so make sure you have a very well ventilated case! The drive is crazy fast and responsive and I made a test with and the speeds are crazy fast, around 13gb for read and 12gb for write, check, my pics. My previous Gen 4 drive made it to around 6gb on both, so its almost twice as fast! Highly recommend it, specially if you deal with tons of data and need fast access, plus Crucial is a very respected memory brand!