TheCrucial T700 SSDcame out in mid-2023 and was one of the very first consumer PCIe 5.0 SSDs to hit the market. The4TB modelarrived at the end of 2023, originally priced at $449 — but prices would head north on all SSDs with reduced NAND production. The T700 4TB peaked at $529 in early 2024, but now it’s down to its lowest price ever at$322 for the T700 heatsink model. That’s only moderately more expensive than a good 4TB PCIe 4.0 SSD.The T700 was, as our review stated, the temporary king of storage. That’s because even at launch, there were already plans for the Phison E26 controller and Micron 232-layer TLC NAND to go even faster. The T700 offered up to 12.4 GB/s of read speeds and 11.8 GB/s of writes, and the eventualCrucial T705arrived in early 2024 and delivered a modest bump to 14.5 GB/s reads and 12.6 GB/s writes. It was probably faster but with clearly diminishing returns.Overall, according to ourSSD benchmarks hierarchyand extensive test results, the T705 offers about 6% more performance than the T700. If you’re after the absolute fastest SSD right now, you can make a case for the T705, butit costs $449to get there. That’s nearly 40% more money for a 6% storage performance boost.
Crucial T700 4TB with Heatsink, PCIe 5.0 SSD:now $322 at Amazon(was $369)The Crucial T700 was the fastest SSD around in 2023, and it remains one of the top performers today, with up to 12.4/11.8 GB/s read/write speeds. If you need plenty of fast storage for your games and AI models, this gets you 94% of the faster T705 for 71% of the cost.
To get the most out of the T700 or any other PCIe 5.0 SSD, you’ll need a desktop with sufficient airflow. We’re serious about that as well. In testing with no active cooling near the drive, temperatures could hit 86C before throttling kicks in, drastically reducing performance. But all that’s needed is a bit of airflow, and the drive will happily chug along at 75C or less.Curiously, the heatsink version currently costs less than the non-heatsink drive, which is currently at $341. If you really don’t want the heatsink, either because you have your own or just plan to use the mobo cooler, you can still remove the Crucial-provided heatsink from the drive with minimal effort.There are muchcheaper 4TB SSDsavailable for the Black Friday season, of course, but all of those are PCIe 4.0 models. The T700 Heatsink drive currently costs less than any other PCIe 5.0 SSD with this capacity. And if you’re enough of a storage enthusiast to want a 4TB Gen5 drive, there’s little reason to look elsewhere right now.
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Jarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom’s Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge ‘3D decelerators’ to today’s GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.
