Adaptive Thermal Protection:

While PCIe SSDs like the T700 offer impressive performance, they also generate a good amount of heat. To keep them from overheating, Crucial has implemented what they call Adaptive Thermal Protection. This technology monitors the temperature of a drive and will automatically reduce its performance when it reaches 81 ºC. If that isn't enough and the temperature continues to rise, Adaptive Thermal Protection will shut the drive down when it reaches 90 ºC.

Using my motherboard's M.2 SSD heatsink, the T700's temperature hovered around 36 ºC at idle. When pushed hard, the drive reached temperatures as high as 62 ºC when reading and 65 ºC when writing. With the temperatures staying well below 81 ºC, there was also no sign of thermal throttling.

The temperatures weren't quite as low with the heatsink-equipped T700. Looking at the screenshot below, you can see that the drive idled at around 41 ºC and reached temperatures as high as 71 ºC when reading and 78 ºC when writing. Nevertheless, the heatsink did its job as there was no sign of thermal throttling.

Final Thoughts:

Crucial has knocked another one out of the park with its new T700 SSD. Available with or without a heatsink, this M.2 form factor drive is powered by Phison's PS5026-E26 controller and is available with up to 4TB of Micron's industry-leading 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. Combine this with a large DRAM cache and an ultra-fast PCIe Gen5 x4 NVMe 2.0 interface and you have one of the fastest consumer NVMe SSDs on the market today. The T700 flew through our sequential transfer rate tests, reading at speeds as high as 12,403 MB/s and writing at more than 11,800 MB/s. It also did very well in our random write tests, producing more than 332,000 IOPS at low queue depths.

Of course, fast read and write speeds aren't the only things the T700 has to offer. The drive uses technologies like Dynamic SLC caching to optimize performance as well as multistep data integrity algorithms and Redundant Array of Independent NAND (RAIN) to protect data and prevent it from becoming corrupted. The T700 also features thermal and power loss protection, active garbage collection and built-in hardware-based encryption. To top it all off, it is one of the few drives to be optimized for Microsoft’s DirectStorage API. While games with DirectStorage support are still few and far between, this technology is expected to speed up load times immensely, especially with a high-performance NVMe SSD like the T700.

The Crucial T700 is available now in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities. Prices for the heatsink-less version currently range from $180 up to $600, with the 2TB version reviewed here retailing for about $340. Otherwise the heatsink-equipped version will run you about $30 more. 

Highs:

  • Available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities
  • PCIe 5.0 x4 interface with NVMe 2.0 protocol
  • Phison PS5026-E26 controller
  • Equipped with Micron 232-Layer B58R 3D TLC NAND
  • Excellent sequential and random read and write speeds
  • Small M.2 2280 form factor
  • Large DRAM cache
  • Dynamic SLC caching
  • Supports Redundant Array of Independent NAND and Multistep Data Integrity Algorithms
  • Built-in hardware-based encryption
  • Supports TRIM and active garbage collection
  • Thermal and power loss protection
  • Available with or without heatsink
  • Optimized for Microsoft’s DirectStorage API
  • Includes Acronis True Image cloning software
  • 5 year warranty

Lows:

  • Can get very hot under heavy workloads
  • Requires a heatsink
  • Write speed drops when SLC cache is full
  • Pricey

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