Whether you’re a seasoned PC-building pro or just starting out on your journey of assembling a custom-built system, there’s one thing you should always bear in mind: future-proofing.
With the speed at which the PC hardware landscape changes, it’s all too easy to put together a top-tier build only to find your components are outdated just a few months down the line. You want to be able to pick your parts with confidence that they’ll not only last for years to come, but also keep providing you with the power and speed you need to keep ahead of the game in an ever-evolving space.
Enter Micron’s Crucial brand, which is finally bringing its next-generation storage solution - the T700 Gen5 NVMe SSD - to the market. PCIe Gen5 drives have been hotly-anticipated by many, bringing blisteringly fast transfer speeds to the masses. So if you’re a serious creative worker who needs top-notch performance for graphic design or video editing, it’s the perfect choice.
What makes PCIe Gen5 so future-proof?
Unlike CPUs and GPUs, which have an irritating tendency to become old news before you’ve even seen the dust settle inside your PC case, memory standards - for both storage and RAM - progress at a slower pace. The 4th generation of PCIe SSDs arrived four years ago, meaning what was cutting-edge then is about to get blown out of the water.
PCIe Gen5 is, to put it simply, capable of ludicrous speeds. Because of the way the PCIe (that’s peripheral component interconnect express, for the uninitiated) interface is improved in each new iteration, Gen5 SSDs will be almost twice as fast as the previous generation - and a whopping 22 times faster than conventional SATA drives.
For the T700, that means read/write speeds of up to 12,400/11,800 MB/s, making this effectively one of the fastest SSDs that money can buy. The PCIe Gen5 standard won’t be going anywhere fast, meaning that this SSD will continue to offer some of the best performance on the market for years to come.
The benefits of this speed
If you’re relatively new to PC-building, you might be asking yourself: ‘Why should I buy a high-speed drive like the T700, and not a cheaper SATA SSD or HDD?’ Well, the drive you need depends entirely on what you want to use your computer for.
If you’re not really planning on using your PC for anything demanding, then sure - go with cheap parts, or just buy a Chromebook. If you’re looking for peak performance, though, this is the way to go.
With Microsoft DirectStorage compatibility, the T700 is perfectly optimized for creative work in Windows, giving you the ability to render high-resolution photos and videos (even 8K+ content) with as much as 99% less CPU resource consumption, leaving your system free to carry out other tasks. If you’re routinely working on large creative projects on your PC, the T700 will mean you spend less time waiting for your files to transfer.
Looking to build the most powerful gaming rig? The T700 is perfect for that too. The boosted transfer speed afforded by PCIe Gen5 means that you won’t be sitting around staring at loading screens, and textures can render up to 60% faster than with Gen4 SSDs, helping to reduce pop-in. And with up to 4TB of storage on a single drive, you’ll be able to store more files, apps, and games than ever before.
If you’re thinking about upgrading your SSD but don’t want to spring for a new PCIe Gen5-compatible motherboard just yet, have no fear - the Crucial T700 is backward-compatible with PCIe 4.0 and 3.0 slots, letting you future-proof your machine for a motherboard upgrade further down the line. You also don’t need one of those fancy onboard heat shields, since the T700 can be purchased with its own premium aluminum and nickel-plated copper heatsink already attached.
Similarly, this drive will work with just about any motherboard-compatible processor, but it’s well-equipped to work with both AMD and Intel’s next-gen CPUs thanks to Micron’s in-house-designed 232-layer TLC NAND3, meaning that users with cutting-edge PCs will get the very best performance from the T700.
There are no fiddly gimmicks or setup speedbumps to be found here, either. Just slot that SSD into your system, and you’re good to go! So if you want a storage solution for your PC that can keep up with your fastest pace, look no further: the Crucial T700 is here.
