Today, Crucial has sent over their brand new T710 2TB Gen5 NVMe SSD for review. This is the successor to the very fast Crucial T705 that I previously reviewed. Like that drive, the T710 is making a play for the high-end Gen5 SSD market and intends to push the limit of the Gen5 interface, and Crucial is claiming some big performance uplifts from the T705. The high-end market space now has ample competition, so I am interested to see how the T710 holds up. Let us get to the review!
Crucial T710 2TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD
The Crucial T710 2TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.
The T710 is available both with and without a heatsink, and as you can see my test drive is the bare drive. The controller is a key difference compared to the T705. The T710 includes a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, whereas the T705 was based on a Phison chip. This controller is paired with Micron TLC and a 2GB DRAM cache.
The backside of the Crucial T710 2TB contains nothing but labels.
Crucial T710 2TB SSD Specs
The Crucial T710 2TB is available between 1TB and 4TB capacity points.
This 2TB model is rated for 14500 MB/s sequential reads and 13800 MB/s writes. These numbers put the T710 at the top-end of claimed Gen5 performance and outpace both the T705 and the Samsung 9100 PRO, at least on paper. Endurance sits at 600TBW per 1TB of capacity, or 1200TBW for my 2TB drive which is perfectly in line with my expectations. And the warranty is the industry standard 5-years for a top-end drive. All of the specs position the T710 at the very top-end of Gen5 drives, and Crucial is also a very long-lived and respected brand.
Crucial is claiming 42% higher random writes, 28% higher random reads, and 9% higher sequential write performance compared to the T705. They are also claiming a 24% reduction in average power use. When we get to testing we will see how the two stack up.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD and confirms we are operating at PCIe 5.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 2.0.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR5-6000 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the Crucial T710 2TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. This slot supports up to PCIe Gen 5 x4. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data, and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.
Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.
My God, You’re Greasy.
> Crucial is claiming 42% higher random writes, 28% higher random reads, and 9% higher sequential write performance compared to the T705. They are also claiming a 24% reduction in average power use. When we get to testing we will see how the two stack up.
Unfortunately no power consumption figures to be found in this review, so no idea if the claim of 24% reduction v T705 is accurate.
Yeah is there a way to get power consumption figures? That would be super helpful!
@George, according to other reviews that test drives more thoroughly the power consumption is about the same as the Samsung 9100 drive except for idle where this drive is much better (0.031W idle, 7.848W large reads, 2.861W small reads).
Just a note here that this drive seems to only hit the same max temps as the Samsung 9100 does, and this drive doesn’t have a heatsink, the reviewed variant of the Samsung does.
It would be very worthwhile to start including power comparison charts, rather than just standalone single value charts for each drive going forward.
Could we move away from these small drives now… and get cheaper 8-16TB ones already… if it read writes 7000 or 8000 MB/s doesn’t really matter anymore when the capacity have stagnated for ages…
While we’re speaking of comparison charts, I miss a small random read comparison or two between drives.
Its possible that I’m working from outdated assumptions but I had the impression that 4KQD1 random reads was still the biggest impact on perceived performance.