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The T500 comes in a small, blue and gray box. Along with a picture of the drive, the packaging advertises a number of its key features including its 2TB capacity, support for PCIe Gen4 NVMe technology, maximum read speed, 5 year warranty and compatibility with the PS5. Inside, you'll find the T500 as well as a small guide with information on where you can get additional help and download the migration and cloning software.
Physical Features:
The T500 uses the 2280 form factor for M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. The heatsink-equipped version measures 80.01 x 23.37 x 9.65mm and tips the scales at around 35g. The drive also has an "M key" edge connector which provides PCIe SSDs with up to 4x lanes of bandwidth.
This heatsink wraps entirely around the drive and is held together using small, circular clips instead of screws. While this ensures a solid fit, it also adds to the overall width of the drive. Compared to the heatsink-less T500, this one is about 1mm wider. This doesn't sound like much. However, you will want to make sure that the card doesn't hit a PCI slot or any of the other components on your motherboard. With the heatsink's increased height (about 8mm), you'll also want to be careful that it doesn't interfere with your video card if your motherboard's M.2 slot is below it. That being said, the heatsink-equipped T500 will fit fine in the PlayStation 5 without any problems.
The T500 is one of the first drives to use Phison's PS5025-E25 controller. Manufactured using TSMC 12nm process technology, this PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 2.0 controller is powered by a dual-core ARM Cortex R5 processor with CoXProcessor technology and has 4 NAND channels with 16 chip enables (CE) per channel. The E25 also offers support for up to 4TB of 3D TLC/QLC NAND flash and features end-to-end data path protection, hardware-based encryption and Phison's fifth generation low-density parity-check (LDPC) and RAID ECC algorithms for improved drive reliability.
For the 2TB version of the heatsink equipped T500, Crucial opted to use Micron's 232-layer (B58R) 3D TLC NAND flash. If you'd remove the heatsink, you'd see that there are two 1TB NAND flash packages on the top of the PCB. The drive also has a single 2GB Micron LPDDR4 DRAM chip that is used for caching.
