Crucial T705 SSD Review: The New King Of SSDs, But It

The second wave of PCIe 5.0 solid-state drives (SSDs) is upon us, with the flagship Crucial T705 aiming to be the fastest drive on the market right now. This M.2 NVMe storage drive can hit speeds of up to 14,500 MB/s (depending on capacity), surpassing every other PCIe 5.0 SSD, while getting a bit warmer in the process. It’s a faster version of Crucial’s T700, which we called “the king of PCIe Gen5 SSDs.” Well, the king is dead. Long live the new king, as Crucial’s T705 is now the ruler of the land.

About this review: Crucial provided XDA with a sample for this review but had no input to its contents.

Crucial T705 Gen5 SSD

Speedy, but spendy

$155 $175 Save $20

The T705 is the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD you can buy right now, and is often discounted, making it better value than the rest of the PCIe 5.0 market.

Pros

• Exceptionally fast transfer speeds at up to 14,500 MB/s
• 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities
• Available with optional heatsink

Cons

• Expensive
• Requires some sort of cooling for optimal performance

Price, specs, and availability

Super speedy SSD storage comes with a super price tag

The Crucial T705 is widely available from major retailers, and from Crucial’s own webstore. You can get three storage options: 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB, all of which are available with and without a hefty heatsink. The 1TB was $240 at launch, or $260 for the one with a heatsink, 2TB was $400, and the 4TB we’re testing now was $714 at launch for the bare drive. Prices have come down since then, with the bare drive starting from $155 for 1TB, and going up to $515 for the 4TB version.

While the drive is rated up to 14,500 MB/s for read speeds, it depends on which capacity drive you pick up. The 1TB has sequential write speeds of up to 10,200 MB/s, and sequential reads of up to 13,600 MB/s. The 2TB is the fastest of the three, with up to 14,500 MB/s reads and 12,700 MB/s writes, and the 4TB has 14,100 MB/s reads and 12,600 MB/s writes. None of these drives are what you’d consider slow, but it’s worth knowing the slight variances if speed is your main consideration.

Storage performance

This is one seriously speedy solid-state storage drive

To test the Crucial T705, we used a test bench with an MSI Z690 Unify-X motherboard, Intel Core i9-12900K processor, and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super. This motherboard has two PCIe 5.0 slots, so we used an expansion card to put the Crucial T705 under a massive heatsink. Crucial recommends a heatsink used with this drive, and it’s our experience that every PCIe 5.0 drive needs some sort of cooling to stay at peak performance without the risk of thermal throttling.

CrystalDiskMark is the first program we usually reach for when testing drives, to see how Crucial’s speed claims match up with other PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 4.0 drives. We included the previous PCIe 5.0 drive from the company, the Crucial T700, and the impressive 4TB Corsair MP700 Pro SE to show where the T705 fits in the top end market. We also added numbers for the Samsung 990 Pro, to see how this new drive from Crucial fares against the best of last-gen PCIe 4.0 drives. For a drive that’s aimed at beating the competition, it’s no surprise the Crucial T705 is among the fastest drives we’ve tested. In fact, it outperforms in most tests, making it the fastest drive we’ve tested, if not by much.

The Crucial T405 performed extremely well with CrystalDiskMark, beating almost every other NVMe SSD we’ve tested in the majority of tests. That’s perhaps expected from a PCIe 5.0 SSD marketed as the fastest on the market, but it’s good to see that our testing also shows this. And remember, the 4TB model we tested isn’t the fastest of the three capacities, so the 2TB capacity drive will likely be a little faster.

Now we are moving onto ATTO Disk Benchmark, which is a great tool for seeing how fast an SSD can transfer data from different file sizes. Here, the T705 didn’t really get into its stride until the I/O size reached 1MB or above. That’s possibly indicating that Crucial tuned this drive for sustained speeds of larger file transfers, like the ones you’d have in video editing workflows.

Throughout our testing, the highest temperature I saw was 53C, which is great for a PCIe 5.0 SSD. The Asus ROG M.2 expansion card used for testing was likely the reason for this, as it has a beefy heatsink and wicks away heat efficiently. As always, we recommend using a heatsink of some description with any PCIe 5.0 SSD, and it’s not a bad idea for PCIe 4.0 SSDs either.

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Should you buy the Crucial T705?

You should buy the Crucial T705 if:

• You want the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD available
• You have a motherboard with M.2 heatsinks or plan to buy the heatsink version
• You have a high-end desktop computer to use it in

You shouldn’t buy the Crucial T705 if:

• You want a value-priced SSD
• You want a SSD to put in your PlayStation 5
• You don’t have a motherboard with PCIe 5.0

The T705 is an excellent upgrade over the earlier T700 PCIe 5.0 SSD from Crucial, using the same components to achieve higher speeds. If you’re planning on building a new-generation system or adding storage space to one you already own, it’s the drive to look at first. You’ll get cutting-edge performance that has a small lead over the rest of the PCIe 5.0 pack.

However, it’s not the best SSD for most users. Those who don’t demand cutting-edge performance from their PCs are going to be better served with a PCIe 4.0 SSD, which will be cheaper, use less power, generate less heat, and can offer up to 8TB of capacity. Benchmarks aside, there are very few situations where anyone needs a PCIe 5.0 SSD, as loading speeds for games, programs, documents, and even operating systems are fast enough on the older PCIe 4.0.

This is about the peak performance for PCIe 5.0 SSDs with current hardware. Micron’s 232-layer NAND and Phison’s E26 controller are used by most of the other PCIe 5.0 drives on the market, including this one, and the theoretical maximums have been reached. To get faster, we’ll need new components from both Phison and Micron, and potentially a rewrite of the M.2 slot specifications, as current drives appear to be hitting the power limits of the socket.

Crucial T705 Gen5 SSD

$155 $175 Save $20

The Crucial T705 is the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD right now, and is the drive to buy if your motherboard supports it.