Crucial T705 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD Review

Crucial is Still King of Gen5 SSDs

When we looked at Crucial’s initial PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD product, the T700, last July, it was truly in a class by itself. Since then other manufacturers have brought their own Gen5 SSDs to market, and the T700 now has company at the up to 12,400 MB/s performance level (the Corsair MP700 PRO is one example).

But Crucial didn’t want to give up the crown. Their new T705 promises the highest sequential numbers yet, with up to 14,500 MB/s read and 12,700 MB/s write speeds specified. That’s pretty impressive, and we were lucky enough to get a 2TB sample in for review. Let’s throw it on a Gen5 capable testbed and see what happens.

Performance Testing

To test performance I was initially going to use the same Intel system I used with our T700 review, but ran into some problems with instability with that system (and unexpectedly slow NVMe SSD performance), so I jumped ship to AM5 and our MSI MEG X670E ACE motherboard, with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X processor and 32GB of DDR5-6000 CL30 memory.

After installing the latest AMD chipset drivers I tested both the new Crucial T705 and previous T700 drives in the MEG X670E ACE motherboard’s “Lightning Gen 5” slot. The stability was rock-solid (finally!), and the full advertised speed of the drive was achieved:

While just a single run at the “Peak Performance” preset (which represents the best-case scenario for most SSDs), it is still impressive to see transfer speeds this high. Random 4K looks good, too.

Now we will take things a bit further, filling both Crucial drives to 50% capacity, and then provide a more granular look at CrystalDiskMark results. The charts below were made after separate test runs at queue depths of 1, 2, 4, and 8:

While CrystalDiskMark is not going to test drives to a Malventanian degree, it is at least flexible enough to allow for testing at various queue depths and thread levels – though in this case we are just looking at single-threaded performance. While there was a bit of back-and-forth at 4K random between the earlier T700 and this new T705, sequential transfer rates are where the new drive really shines. Now, how much you will be able to take advantage of the full 14,500 MB/s we saw beginning at QD8 is a mystery to me, but at some point motherboards with multiple Gen5 capable M.2 slots will be common.

That PCMark 10 chart above not only serves to illustrate just how much different performance in “real world” tasks is from CrystalDiskMark numbers, but it places the spotlight on thermals. I appreciate that Crucial does not attach any fans to their heatsink, leaving airflow up to the user – and not a shrill, tiny fan. By simply placing the drive in the path of a low-speed case fan, thermals were a non-factor. Placing the drive in an area without any discernible airflow, however, saw the drive reach a thermal limit – as the numbers clearly indicate.

Final Thoughts

It seems like just yesterday that Gen4 drives with sequential transfer speeds in the 7000 MB/s range put a system builder on top of the storage game, but Gen5 is upon us, like it or not, and this Crucial T705 is doubling up on those sequential numbers – though in everyday use it may be harder to differentiate one of these from a fast Gen4 drive.

A look at the cross-section of the T705’s fanless heatsink; an extruded aluminum design that likes a bit of airflow

• 1TB – no heatsink – CT1000T705SSD3 – $239.99 USD list
• 1TB – with heatsink – CT1000T705SSD5 – $259.99 USD list
• 2TB – no heatsink – CT2000T705SSD3 – $399.99 USD list
• 2TB with heatsink – CT2000T705SSD5 – $439.99 USD list (as reviewed)
• 4TB – no heatsink – CT4000T705SSD3 – $713.99 USD list
• 4TB – with heatsink – CT4000T705SSD5 – $729.99 USD list

Certainly, Crucial did not disappoint with their latest SSD, as the T705 is faster than the already blazing-fast T700. If you can somehow make use of this kind of storage bandwidth, or if you just want to own the fastest SSD in the world, the T705 might be for you.