Introduction

Crucial is one of the biggest players in the SSD market, serving as Micron's consumer brand and benefiting from their parent company's vertical integration. Crucial use Micron's own NAND and DRAM, reducing costs and improving reliability. This gives them a competitive edge not only for pricing and sourcing, but possibly performance, too.



The Crucial T710 is a new flagship PCI-Express 5.0 SSD, built using the recent Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, which is designed for efficiency and thus reduced thermal output. We've seen this controller before on several reviews, like the Acer Predator GM9000, Kingston Fury Renegade and Lexar NM1090. Several other drives using the SM2508 have also been announced recently.

As expected, the T710 uses in-house NAND flash—the new Micron 276-layer 3D TLC B68S. Crucial also includes a DRAM cache of 2 GB of LPDDR4 memory, used to manage the SSD's internal data structures.

The Crucial T710 is available in capacities of 1 TB ($180), 2 TB ($280) and 4 TB ($550). A model with heatsink is available for an additional $20. The endurance is set to 600 TBW, 1200 TBW and 2400 TBW respectively. Crucial includes a five-year warranty with the T710 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 two flash chips, a DRAM cache chip is included, too.


Crucial's sticker is just a plastic sticker, there is no metal core, so the thermal properties are slightly worse than a sticker with a metal core.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion Technology SM2508 controller is the company's first PCI-Express 5.0 controller for consumer applications. It supports PCIe 5.0 x4 and runs with eight flash channels at 3600 MT/s. SMI fabricates the controller using a 6 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The two flash chips are Micron 276-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


The Micron DRAM cache chip has a capacity of 2 GB and runs at LPDDR4-4266.

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.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen

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 700 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 85% of their capacity. This is intentional, to run the drive in realistic operating conditions—nobody uses a nearly-empty SSD in their system. It also puts additional stress on the pseudo-SLC cache subsystem, because there is less free NAND space to work with.
• Partitions are aligned properly.
• 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.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen