Crucial T700: Fast PCIe 5.0 SSD coming in May
Crucial has announced its first PCI Express 5.0 capable SSD, the T700 with capacities of 1, 2 and 4 TB. With sequential transfer rates of up to 12.4 GB/s (reading) and 11.8 GB/s (writing), the T700 is a bit faster than the previously announced PCIe 5.0 SSDs, which usually reach 10 GB/s .
This is due to the NAND flash memory used: All previous PCIe 5.0 SSDs for desktop PCs use the same E26 controller from Phison, which basically achieves 14 GB/s, but relies on fast memory components. In the T700, Crucial uses the current NAND flash generation from the parent Micron with 232 memory layers. The TLC chips store three bits per cell (triple level cells). A small DRAM cache is also included.
The YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips has already tested a pre-series model of the T700 and certifies its high sequential transfer rates – but only for a few seconds when reading. After that, the SLC cache is full, which writes one instead of three bits per cell (single level cells), so the write speed drops to around 3 GB/s. In practice, this should hardly be noticeable, since the brake only occurs after a few dozen GB of copied data.
More IOPS under better conditions
However, there were still hiccups in the random access rates: Even with an advantageous queue depth of 32 – that is, the SSD controller can presort 32 access requests and thus increase the speed – the SSD only managed 845 MB/s with small 4 KB blocks. That’s a little over a meager 200,000 IOPS.
The pre-production model of the Crucial T700 was slow in random access, probably also because of the test system used.
(Image: Linus Tech Tips)
The website The SSD Review shows that systems with AMD’s Ryzen processors often achieve lower IOPS values in benchmarks than Intel PCs. We have also observed this behavior in SSD tests. Linus Tech Tips used an AM5 system with the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X. Intel’s Core i-13000 (Raptor Lake) and Core i-12000 (Alder Lake) only provide 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes. If an SSD takes four of them, the graphics card is only supplied with eight lanes.
Under optimal conditions, the T700 should achieve around 1.5 million IOPS, i.e. around 50 percent more than current high-end models with PCIe 4.0.
Crucial has not yet commented on the prices of the T700 SSDs.
(mma)
