The Crucial T700 NVME SSD represents the best tech from Micron/Crucial combined with a Phison controller and a lot of onboard cache memory from Crucial/Micron as well. It's among the first-ever products that ship with PCIe Gen5 supports that boost linear/sequential performance up to 12GB/sec, assuming you have the latest motherboard/CPU combo. The T700 series comes in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, and for sure is a top performer according to the official Crucial's specifications.

The Crucial T700 is offered both bare and with a pre-installed heatsink. They have a $30 difference and we can say that adding at least a passive heatsink is a must for Gen5 drive(s). So how is the performance? The Crucial T700 is advertised as capable of reaching 12GB/sec reading and 11GB/sec writing performance, and several synthetic tests confirmed this.

This is probably the fastest storage performance you get buy right now according to the synthetic benchmarks. However, in real-life scenarios, you have to buy at least two Crucial T700 NVME drives to write from one to the other in order to benefit the best from such increased speeds. All PCIe Gen4 drives tend to cap around 7.2GB/sec, meaning if you have more NVMEs in your new system you won't get top performance in all areas.

While sequential speeds are very important for users who move a lot of big data, real-life usage and for example gaming, also involve small files, which in this case, you won't see such a big performance leap from Gen4 drives. In fact, we saw rather big I/O Latency numbers, at least with our AMD-based system, which lead to low IOMETER scores, and also the PCMark10 and 3DMark storage scores weren't the best. On the other hand, the writing performance seems stellar, even writing a big 218 GB-sized file, won't drop the writing performance, the onboard memory cache seems to make wonders here. The Crucial T700 is also futureproofed since it includes the latest technologies from Microsoft (DirectStorage), which is offered only under Windows 11, so the games that will support it will further get acceleration when reading/writing a lot of data.

Another issue we found was the high running temperatures, even for the T700 version with the heatsink pre-installed. While under normal use the drive will be around 62 Celsius, at high and constant loads, we saw temps around 80 Celsius, which will result in thermal throttle and therefore reduced performance. We would suggest getting the bare T700 to drive and either using the motherboard stock passive heatsink or getting an NVME SSD cooler from ThermalRight like the HR-10 2280 PRO BLACK, which for sure will keep your drive under control and around 50 Celsius, as users have reported. Further performance increase can be found by using the Crucial Storage Executive Software and the "Momentum Cache”, which will make use of the system's RAM to get even higher reading/writing rates. The drive supports 1200TB (TBW) endurance, on par with other 2TB drives, and has 5 years of warranty.

Concluding this review, the Crucial T700 is a product that aims for power/enthusiast users who wish to have the latest/fastest and possible best components for their systems. The retail price is very high, compared with Gen4 2TB products, and if you want to jump at the PCIe Gen5 wagon, then this product will be your next best friend.