Crucial’s Latest T700 Gen5 NVMe SSD Will Be As Slow As An HDD When Thermally Throttled

Crucial's T700 PCIe Gen5 SSDs have a throttling mechanism that can push its performance down to HDD levels when it's thermally constrained.

This feature found on the Crucial T700 Gen 5 SSD and discovered by Computerbase is different than other SSDs, such as Corsair's MP700, which terminates the power from the controller, which will lead the system to halt and give the user a blue error display, or BSOD.

Drives do this as a protection feature where the Crucial T700 M.2 NVME 5.0 SSD continues to run while stressed, but it also affects the performance by dropping to speeds lower than a hard disk drive. CrystalDiskMark measurements display the drive's performance to drop to nearly 101 MB/s compared to its actual transfer rates of over 12 GB/s.

The Crucial T700 5.0 NVMe SSDs ship with the standard NVMe 2.0 Gen5 x4 interface in an M.2 2280 design. The capacities of Crucial's new drives are 1 TB, 2 TB, & up to 4 TB capacities, offering up to sequential read speeds of 12.4 GB/s and sequential write speeds of 11.8 GB/s. Other Gen5 SSDs have a performance peak of 10 GB/s read, and 9.5 GB/s write speeds.

Crucial's T700 Gen5 NVMe SSDs feature a double-sided PCB with targeted thermal materials, nickel-plated copper bottom plate, and an aluminum plate and are designed to maximize the airflow.

The Crucial T700 PCie Gen5 NVMe SSD is currently billed as the "World's Fastest Gen5 NVMe SSD," designed for high-performance gaming, photo, and video editing. Some of the partners include AMD, NVIDIA, and ASUS. The Crucial T-Series products will feature Micron's 232L NAND and be Microsoft DirectStorage API compliant.

While more significant heatsinks are offered with drives like these, which are highly recommended, this does open up opportunities for OEMs to develop smaller cooling options for products such as small form factor workstations and laptops, especially ones used for premium gaming experiences.

However, the fact that the Corsair MP700 currently is sold without a cooler, causing the consumer to purchase a separate cooler or risk drive failure, is troublesome. This fact has caused an uproar in the media, primarily due to the limited quantities of the Corsair SSD and its incredibly premium pricing.

Crucial is taking pre-orders for the 1 TB T700 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD, which will retail for $209.99. The 2 TB version is expected to retail for $339.99, while the 4 TB variants retail for $599.99. Crucial plans for the new SSDs will be available by this month's end. Users interested in any of the new Crucial solid-state drives can click any of the links to direct you to the capacity that is preferred or needed:

News Sources: Computerbase, Computerbase (Twitter), TechPowerUp