Tested: Crucial's New T700 Is the Fastest PCI Express 5.0 SSD Yet

pcmag.com:

Hold on to your bits: A new internal-SSD speed champ has just blown into town—though you may have to wait a while to get your hands on one. Even as we were testing the Aorus 10000 Gen5 SSD, our first encounter with the hyper-fast PCI Express 5.0 bus applied to SSDs, we received an engineering sample (pre-production unit) of storage giant Micron's Crucial T700, the company's first PCIe 5.0 drive. (According to Micron, the finished product should be available by the end of May.)

This early sample has a few bits of unfinished business. According to Micron, the drive still has to clear some regulatory hurdles; the TCG OPAL(Opens in a new window) functionality isn't yet activated; and both random writes and power consumption are due for some optimizations. So we're not doing a formal review here, or assigning it a formal Editors' Rating quite yet; that will come when we get our hands on a retail-level sample of the drive.

But in the meantime, a performance preview: We put the T700 through its paces, and it performed as we'd expected based on its rated speeds, breezing past the Aorus 10000 Gen5 to post the highest sequential read and write scores we've ever seen from a single internal drive, and outpacing the Aorus—generally by a small margin—on nearly every other test we ran.

The T700 is a a four-lane drive running the NVMe 2.0 protocol over a PCIe 5.0 bus. It is a two-sided M.2 Type-2280 SSD in "gumstick" format. The T700 uses Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND chips and Phison's new E26 controller. It will come in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities.

The 2TB model (which we tested) and the 4TB model are both rated at 12,400MBps maximum sequential read speed and 11,800MBps sequential write speed, with the 1TB T700 rated at 11,700MBps