Crucial T710 Gen 5 SSD Review – Pointlessly Fast

This is Crucial’s latest and greatest PCIe Gen 5 M.2 NVMe SSD, the T710. While the box claims peaks of 14.5GB/s, Crucial’s website claims 14.9GB/s on reads and 13.8GB/s on writes, with the box quoting the existing T705’s speeds, and the website quoting a (slight) improvement. Let’s take a look at this thing and see if it’s worth the premium price tag. I should note this comes in either 1TB, 2TB or 4TB capacities, and either with or without a heatsink. I’ve got the 2TB sans heatsink version, which is likely what I’d opt for should I splash out for one of these as most motherboards have massive heatsinks built in now so having a heatsink on the drive itself normally just gets in the way of that. I should note that it did get a little toasty, even with a big motherboard heatsink, although that was after writing the entire drive’s capacity in one shot which I think is pretty expected. Still you’ll want a heatsink, be that on the drive or on your board, with this one.

The drive itself is a standard 2280 M.2 M key drive, with Crucial’s recent minimalist black design. It’s single sided, and a peek under the sticker shows that for the first time in a while I have a drive in that actually has a DRAM cache! This 2TB model has two of Micron’s latest G9 276 Layer TLC NAND flash packages – assumedly the 4TB model has two 2TB packages, versus two 1TB packages here, and I’d guess two 512GB packages to maintain the speed. You also get a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller – a five core, 1.2GHz, 6nm, chip with four ARM Cortex-R8 cores and one Cortex-M0 on the side, which is notably higher end than Phison’s E26 controller. Plus, of course, you have the DRAM cache, which I think is either 12GB or 16GB on this 2TB model (the D8 in the part number appears to be Micron’s way of saying 96Gb or 128Gb), but I’m not 100% sure on that. Anyway, the most interesting thing about this drive for me, at least compared to the existing T705 from Crucial, is the power savings. This thing draws 8.25W, versus 11.25W on the T705, which is a marked improvement I think mostly thanks to the new controller. That’s an impressive reduction! 

So, that’s the specs, let’s look at the performance. Now this is only the second PCIe Gen 5 SSD I’ve had in, with the only other being Crucial’s lower end T510, which is a DRAMless mid-performance Gen 5 drive, so when looking at the sequential Crystal Disk Mark results, it’s obvious this thing is the fastest I’ve ever tested. It doesn’t quite hit the 14.9GB/s claimed, although no drive does. It does break 14GB/s though which is certainly impressive, with writes up at 13.3GB/s. That’s nearly twice as fast as a good Gen 4 drive! With a queue depth of one instead you do see less performance, around 9.5GB/s on reads and 10.3GB/s on writes, but that’s still worlds above the Gen 4 drives. There isn’t much competition! Where it gets really interesting is with the random 4K blocks and a queue depth of 32, as the T710 is only a fraction faster than the T510, which itself is beat (handily) by a number of Gen 4 drives. This is the interesting thing with increasing the overall bandwidth – it doesn’t intrinsically improve every metric, I mean it’s still functionally the same flash at the end of the day! With a queue depth of one though things make a tiny bit more sense with the T710 up at the top – although only leading the DRAMless P310 by 1MB/s on writes! It is the only drive to break (well) past the 100MB/s mark on reads though.

AS SSD has the T710 back up at the top with the sequential test, although as is common with AS SSD the results are a good bit lower than Crystal Disk Mark at 10.6GB/s on writes and 10.1GB/s on reads – interestingly slightly faster writes than reads here! The gap to the T510 is smaller, but it’s still a resounding victory for the T710 of course. With a random 4 kilobyte block size, the T510 and T710 actually swap places on writes – admittedly only by 5MB/s but still – although the T710 still has a pretty strong lead in reads. With 64 threads, the same test is even more strange. The T710 sits at the middle of the pack with, well, fairly middling write performance, but damn those are some strong reads… This clears the next fastest drive in reads by a full gigabyte per second, matching the fastest drive I’ve tested on WRITES, which as you can see is no mean feat. 

Finally, for the synthetic benchmarks anyway, we have ATTO Disc Benchmark, and I think it’s pretty clear which drive is the fastest here. The T710 doesn’t suffer the same lagging performance as the T510, in fact I’d argue it holds a convincing (if tiny) lead over every other drive tested, with the higher available bandwidth really coming available with blocks larger than 64KB. Interestingly ATTO only gets to around 14.2GB/s on reads and 13.6GB/s on writes, so again a touch lower than the claimed figures. That isn’t all that surprising, it’s just worth noting!

As for file transfers, I tried setting up a RAMDisk to copy files from, and to my surprise the best I saw was a stable 4GB/s. Whether that’s down to the RAMDisk, Windows or the drive itself it’s hard to say, and copying from a very fast Gen 4 drive was only around 3GB/s or so – which is a little lower than usual too actually. What’s more impressive to me is that when duplicating the around 100GB worth of files on the drive, we still get around 3.3GB/s – despite hammering the reads and writes simultaneously. That’s faster than the T510 – although not by that much, only 300MB/s or so. That lack of difference was quite a surprise to me, as even if you go with half the write performance you should still be talking about 6GB/s or so, not 3.3GB/s. Again it’s hard to say for sure why that is, but it is still damn fast. As for the SLC cache, that’s where this thing is pretty impressive. After around 300GB or so the performance drops to around 2GB/s, but that’s where it stays FOR THE ENTIRE SIZE OF THE DRIVE! That’s damn impressive. Temps did creep up to the thermal throttling point of 75°C but they quickly came back down after the torture test was over.

The biggest catch for the T710 for me anyway is that while this is undoubtedly a fast drive – possibly the fastest around right now – why do you need this much speed? I mean it’s clearly faster than the system can keep up with, and I can’t think of a genuine use case where this much speed would make a single modacome of difference. Even with Steam’s insane compression, your internet is already likely slower than even a Gen 4 drive, and games don’t load any faster on this. Even when DirectStorage finally rears its head in some games, I don’t think it’s going to make any difference playing on a Gen 4 drive, so why bother getting this thing? That question becomes especially poignant when you hear that this thing is £234 – which is £50 more than the T705, which this bests by 0.4GB/s according to Crucial. Crucial’s own T500 – a fast Gen 4 drive – is only £114 for the same 2TB capacity, which just seems unfathomably better value. I can’t really understand why you’d spend literally double for this T710 when there are endless Gen 4 options that’ll do the job exactly as well. Of course that’s me, but I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below. Would you opt for this rather pricey – but undoubtedly fast – drive, or something on the cheaper side?