Temperature:
While PCIe SSDs like the T500 offer impressive performance, they also generate a good amount of heat. To keep themselves from overheating, most SSDs have implemented a mechanism called thermal throttling which automatically reduces a drive's performance when it reaches a certain temperature.
If you're someone looking to get the most out of your SSD, this is something that you don't want to happen. As a result, companies like Crucial have begun to equip many of their PCIe SSDs with a heatsink.
The T500's heatsink did a great job of keeping it cool. At idle, the T500's temperature averaged about 30 ºC. Under heavy loads, it reached temperatures as high as 58 ºC when reading and 60 ºC when writing. These temperatures had no impact on the drive's performance. No matter how hard I pushed it, the T500 did not throttle its read or write speeds in any noticeable way.
Final Thoughts:
The Crucial T500 is an excellent choice for the gamer or creative professional looking for a fast, yet affordable, Gen4 NVMe SSD for their computer or PlayStation 5 gaming console. Available with or without an integrated heatsink, this M.2 form factor drive is powered by Phison's PS5025-E25 controller and is available with up to 2TB of Micron's industry-leading 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. Combine this with a large DRAM cache and a PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 2.0 interface and you have drive that is more than 2x faster than Gen3 NVMe SSDs. The 2TB T500 flew through our sequential transfer rate tests, reading at speeds as high as 7,426 MB/s and writing at more than 7,000 MB/s. The drive also did very well in our random write tests, producing more than 187,000 IOPS at low queue depths.
The T500 is available now in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities with prices for the heatsink-less version ranging from $72 to $149 on Amazon.com. If you want the heatsink, expect to pay about $10 to $20 more.
Highs:
- Available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities
- PCIe 4.0 x4 interface with NVMe protocol
- Phison PS5025-E25 controller
- Equipped with Micron 232-Layer B58R 3D TLC NAND
- Excellent sequential and random read and write performance
- Small M.2 2280 form factor
- Large DRAM cache
- Full hardware-based encryption
- Available with or without heatsink
- Optimized for Microsoft’s DirectStorage API
- Works with PlayStation 5
- Includes Acronis True Image cloning software
- Reasonably priced
- 5 year warranty
Lows:
- Write speed drops when SLC cache is full
