Introduction

Crucial is one of the biggest players in the SSD market because they can use their own NAND chips paired with DRAM manufactured by their parent company Micron.



Today we have for review the Crucial T700 Pro 4 TB, which is the only 4 TB PCI-Express Gen 5 drive currently available on the market. While other vendors have Gen 5 SSDs with 1 TB and 2 TB, only Crucial is offering a 4 TB variant. This makes the T700 Pro a unique offering for those who need a ton of fast PCIe 5.0 storage and are willing to pay the premium for it. Under the hood, the T700 uses the Phison E26 controller, which at this time is the only PCIe 5.0 controller in mass production. The NAND chips are made by Micron, Crucial's parent company, and are their 232-layer 2000 MT/s version, so transfer rates of up to 12 GB/s can be achieved. As expected for a high-end drive, a DRAM cache chip is included, too.

The Crucial T700 Pro (with heatsink) is available in capacities of 1 TB ($200), 2 TB ($290) and 4 TB ($530). There's also a model without heatsink for $165 / $270 / $500. Endurance for these models is set to 600 TBW, 1200 TBW and 2400 TBW, respectively. Crucial includes a five-year warranty with the T700 SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 5.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 4.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips, two DRAM cache chips are included, too.


Crucial's cooler looks quite solid with lots of surface area, it's a fanless design.


It is held together with four screws, which ensure it doesn't come apart over time. While most vendors use thermal pads, Crucial opted for a different TIM, which is much closer to dots of thermal paste that got squished together. This appears to be a superior solution to thermal pads, because there's very little thermal throttling in our testing, despite the lack of an active fan.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5026-E26 is Phison's first PCI-Express 5.0 controller. It is the company's current flagship with support for eight flash channels and NVMe 2.0, using an Arm Cortex design. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


Two Micron DDR4-4266 chips provide a total of 8 GB of fast DRAM for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• M.2 drives are tested with a fan blowing on them; that is, except for the results investigating uncooled behavior on the thermal testing page.

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 600 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 80% of their capacity
• Partitions are properly aligned.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.