Crucial is preparing to launch its ultra-fast T700 SSD, which is now available to pre-order starting at $209.99 for the 1TB model. The drive is currently the world's fastest Gen 5 SSD, surpassing all of the SSDs on our list of best SSDs with read speeds of nearly 12 GB/s. The drive launches later this month, on May 30.
The T700 is a PCIe Gen 5.0 x4 NVMe M.2 SSD, rated for up to 12,400 MB/s in sequential read speeds, and up to 11,800 MB/s in sequential write speeds, as well as random read speeds and write speeds of up to 1,500K. It's a double-sided 2280 M.2 drive featuring Phison's bleeding-edge E26 controller, 4GB of LPDDR4 memory, and Microsoft DirectStorage API.
Performance will vary depending on the drive capacity you choose: the 1TB model will feature slightly lower read and write speeds (11,700 MB/s sequential read speeds, 9,500MB/s sequential write speeds, 1,350K random read speeds, 1,400K random write speeds, as well as an endurance rating of 600TB). The 2TB and 4 TB both get the faster drive speeds mentioned earlier, with the only difference being the drive endurance — which is rated at 1,200TB for the 2TB model and 2,400TB for the 4TB model.
We previewed the drive two weeks ago, and found it indeed lives up to its superlative as the world's fastest SSD. The prototype T700 we received outperformed every single SSD we've tested so far, including the Phison PS5026 engineering sample, Aorus Gen 5 10000, Samsung 990 Pro, and more in a plethora of tests including DiskBench, PCMark 10, and 3DMark. We expect the production version to perform just as well — if not better — than the prototype version we tested.
Unsurprisingly, Crucial's new SSD won't come cheap and cost roughly twice what PCIe Gen 4 drives go for these days. The drive will start at $179.99 for the 1TB model, while the 2TB model will cost $339.99, and the 4TB model will cost a whopping $599.99. Heatsink versions of the T700 will cost an additional $30 on top of the initial price.
